HGB Ep. 619 - The Life and Afterlife of Janis Joplin

This Month in History - Queen Victoria Proclaimed Empress of India

In the month of January, on the 1st, in 1877, Queen Victoria was officially proclaimed as the Empress of India. This was done at the first Delhi Durbar (DUR-bar) ceremony. The term "Durbar" comes from the Persian language, meaning a ruler's court and was adopted from Mughal (moo-gl) traditions. Its purpose was to mark the succession or coronation of British sovereigns as rulers of India after the British Parliament passed the Royal Titles Act in 1876. Thus transferring power from the dissolved East India Company, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Delhi was chosen as the location due to its historical association with imperial power, even though Calcutta (now Kolkata Coal kah tuh) was the administrative capital at the time. There have been three major Delhi Durbars in history, the first in 1877 with Queen Victoria, the second in 1903 coronating King Edward VII and the third in 1911, coronating King George V and Queen Mary. The 1911 Delhi Durbar, announced the movement India's capital from Calcutta to Delhi. In essence, the first Delhi Durbar was a calculated act of political theatre designed to cement British imperial authority at a crucial time in India's colonial history.

The Life and Afterlife of Janis Joplin

Every one who loved her, called her Pearl. Janis Joplin was an energetic singer who lived life hard and fast. Her talent has been inspirational to generations of musicians. Imagine the heights she could've risen to if her life hadn't been snuffed out too early. Janis became a member of the 27 Club after injecting a potent very pure hit of heroin. The hotel where she overdosed is said to still be haunted by her spirit. Join us for the life and afterlife of Janis Joplin! 

Janis Joplin's life began on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas at St. Mary's Hospital. She was the eldest child of Dorothy and Seth Joplin. Janis was raised in a Christian home and her parents worried as she got older and seemed to drift into a group of outcasts. These outcasts loved music and would sit around listening to blues music by Leadbelly, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Janis would sing along and really enjoyed it and she joined the choir at Thomas Jefferson High School. School was tough as she was bullied often and teased about her acne scarring. She graduated in 1960 and headed to Lamar State College of Technology for a brief time and transferred to the University of Texas in Austin. The hippie movement was just getting ready to emerge and wouldn't peak until the Summer of Love in 1967, so Joplin was a little different than the other women on campus. The campus paper even ran a story in 1962 on how different she was because she went around barefoot and wearing Levis. She also always had her Autoharp too. She formed a folk trio with two men, Powell St. John and Lanny Wiggins, and they called themselves the Waller Creek Boys.

In 1963, Janis decided she was done with school and hitchhiked to San Francisco. And she ended up in what would become hippie central in Haight-Ashbury. This area was having a growing issue with drugs, specifically speed. People think it was mostly psychedelics like acid that were a problem, but even Manson's group was way into the speed. LSD would come into play as well with the Manson murders, but speed was always involved and this is where Janis really got into that scene. Before long, she had the reputation of being a "speed freak." She also started drinking heavily with Southern Comfort being her favorite. Eventually, Janis would try heroin and get hooked on that. 

And while drugs and alcohol, unfortunately, are going to be a key theme in Joplin's life, her sister shared with the world in her book "Love, Janis" that her sister was highly intelligent and sensitive and that she was devoted to her family. She was articulate and no one can deny she was amazingly talented when it came to writing and singing music. That's why addiction sucks so hard. Drinking became a theme in some of her songs. She wrote and recorded the song "What Good Can Drinkin' Do" in December of 1962 while she was still at the University of Texas. This was her first recorded song and was a 12-bar blues song. Joplin claimed that she wrote the song in a drunken stupor. Joplin loved Beat Poets and enjoyed following that scene in the Haight and she started collaborating with other singers she met in the area. In 1964, Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen, who would become the guitarist for Jefferson Airplane, recorded some blues standards together. There were seven tracks and these wouldn't be released until after Janis' death as the bootleg album "The Typewriter Tape." It had that name because Jorma's wife played a typewriter in the background of one of the songs. Shortly before that effort, Janis got into trouble with the law for the first time. Her drug addiction led her to start shoplifting and in 1963, she was arrested. As she fell further into addiction, she started losing lots of weight, to the point that people described her as emaciated, and she had been a full-figured gal when she was in college. Within two years, she was skeletal. Her friends in San Francisco were growing very concerned and they knew she needed to get out of the Haight, so they encouraged her to head home to Port Arthur. They paid for her bus ride. For us, these seem like good friends, but Janis told Rolling Stone magazine writer David Dalton in 1970 about that time, "I didn't have many friends and I didn't like the ones I had."

We can only imagine what Janis' parents must of thought when they saw their daughter get off that bus. They helped her to recuperate and she changed her life. She didn't drink or do drugs and re-enrolled in college at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas as an anthropology major. She would change to a social work major later. Austin had a growing music scene and Janis would commute there with her acoustic guitar and perform. Janis even started wearing her hair in a beehive if you can imagine that. 

She had also been dating a man named Peter de Blanc when she was in San Francisco and he had moved to New York while she was in Texas, so they were doing the long distance thing. Peter decided he wanted to marry Janis, so he flew to Texas to ask her father for her hand and the couple became engaged. Peter traveled a lot and perhaps that is why he called off the engagement a few months later. San Francisco was calling to Joplin again and she returned there in 1966. And it isn't surprising because of what we would learn from therapy sessions that Janis attended in Port Arthur. Janis hated the idea of not being successful with music and she feared being stuck working as a keypunch operator or secretary or just being a housewife. And she also thought she couldn't perform without drugs and alcohol. Her psychiatrist, Bernard Giarritano, told biographer Myra Friedman after Janis had died that she didn't think she could have a professional singing career without relapsing into drugs. He asked her to bring her guitar with her and would get her to sing and he tried to reassure her that she performed just fine sober. His reason fell on deaf ears, but Janis did lay down seven tracks with just her and her acoustic guitar in Austin before leaving for San Francisco. These included her original composition "Turtle Blues" and an alternate version of "Cod'ine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie, which would be released posthumously years later. 

On June 4, 1966, Joplin joined psychedelic rock band Big Brother and The Holding Company. This band was up and coming in the Haight and managed to get a record deal with independent record producer Mainstream Records. They recorded their self-titled album in 1967, but it wouldn't be released until they became more successful later. 

And that success came after they performed at the Monterey Pop Festival. The festival ran from June 16-18 in 1967 and people went crazy for the band and Janis in particular. Big Brother and The Holding Company and Janis performed Big Mama Thornton’s "Ball and Chain" with a barnstormer performance. Cass Elliot was captured on film in the crowd mouthing "Wow, that’s really heavy" during Joplin’s performance. Papers were talking about Janis internationally and Clive Davis, who was president of Columbia Records at the time, sought to get her signed. Albert Grossman, who was Bob Dylan's manager pursued Joplin as well. This was probably amazing for Janis because she had attended the festival in 1963 and got to meet Bob Dylan, who she considered an idol. She told him, "I’m gonna be famous one day!" Dylan responded,  "Yeah, we’re all gonna be famous." And they both certainly did become famous. It started for Janis right here at that very festival. Columbia Records did sign the band and they re-released their debut album with the songs "Down on Me," "Bye Bye Baby," "Call On Me" and "Coo Coo." The band's next album was called Cheap Thrills, which included a live version of "Ball and Chain" as well as "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime." Just eight weeks after release, Cheap Thrills reached number one on the Billboard 200 album chart and stayed number one for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks.

Joplin tried hard to do life without drugs. When she first got to San Francisco, she moved into an apartment with a man named Travis Rivers who had been sent to Austin to bring her back to San Francisco. Janis made him promise that needles wouldn't be allowed in their apartment, but Travis eventually broke that promise when he left some friends at the apartment and Janis walked in to find them shooting up. A band mate who was with her, Dave Getz, later recalled that she went nuts and screamed at Travis when he returned "We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!" When Getz tried to comfort her she said, "You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!"

Joplin decided to break from Big Brother in 1969 and she formed a new band to back her up called the Kozmic Blues Band and they were the ones with her at Woodstock. They helped her produce her first solo album "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!" with the songs "Kozmic Blues" and covers like "Summertime" and "To Love Somebody." The sound was a shift for Joplin from the psychedelic rock to more R&B and soul. The band appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on the night of July 18, 1969 and they performed "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and "To Love Somebody." Joplin had no idea what Woodstock was going to be. She figured it was just another gig and that's how she put it to her band mates. While Woodstock was supposed to be all about peace, love and happiness, it really was a shit show. Organizers had thought they would have around 200,000 people and they had half a million. Roads were blocked by abandoned cars, there weren't enough bathrooms, not enough garbage cans, limited food and water, rain left everything a muddy quagmire with mud and cow manure mixed together and then there was a ton of drugs. The schedule for performers were in a disarray and all the performers had to be flown in by helicopter. So here comes Janis on a helicopter,  with a pregnant Joan Baez sitting next to her, and she looks down and sees this horde of people below. She was really nervous when she saw that. Joplin had to wait for several other groups to play and this would be a downfall for her performance because she proceeded to drink and shoot heroin. The set Janis played was iconic and emotional, but it was hampered by her drunkenness. The performance was so ragged that Joplin made sure that not a single one of her songs was included in the original Woodstock documentary. She did engage the audience and her voice was powerful. She said from the stage, "I don’t mean to be preachy, but we ought to remember, and that means promoters, too, that music is for grooving, man, not for putting yourself through bad changes. You don’t have to take anyone’s shit, man, just to like music, you know what I mean? So if you’re getting more shit than you deserve, you know what to do about it, man? It’s just music, man. Music’s supposed to be different than that." The crowd screamed for an encore and she gave one. Pete Townshend of the Who watched her perform before the Who took the stage and he wrote in his 2012 memoir, "She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn't at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she'd consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible." Janis stayed at Woodstock until it was over.

At about the same time that Janis was with the Kozmic Blues Band, she started asking people to call her Pearl because she was tired of being Janis. Some people said that this was like Janis becomeing a split personality because she was under so much pressure. She really was the first woman to front a band of her own creation. Other women had been guest singers with bands, but this was Janis in charge of her own thing. She started drinking and drugging more  and the group just fell apart barely a year after forming. And Janis still had contract obligations. She met several Canadian musicians and Janis formed what critics say was her best backing band, The Full Tilt Boogie Band. 

Joplin toured Canada with Full Tilt and then they set off on a US tour. They also started recording Janis' next album. It would be while they were working on this that Janis would die. Columbia only liked two of the songs, so they scrapped the album, but Full Tilt wasn't going to give up on Janis. They worked on the songs and mastered them and convinced Columbia to agree to more songs. They also had a recording of Janis singing Mercedes Benz in front of a bunch of friends and they added that to the album. Columbia accepted the album and it was named Pearl for Janis' nickname. This would be the biggest selling album of Joplin's career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of "Me and Bobby McGee." Before dying, Janis also made two appearances on the Dick Cavett Show. In October of 1970, Janis was living out of the Landmark Motor Hotel while making the album Pearl. The Landmark was popular with rock stars because of its proximity to drugs and the management looked the other way with partying. Today, this is the the Highland Gardens Hotel located at 7047 Franklin Ave. Janis stayed in Room 105. Joplin had stopped her drug use temporarily when she traveled to Brazil in February 1970 and lived there for awhile. She apparently was romanced by an American tourist named David Niehaus and was happy and carefree. David hated drugs and this helped to keep her sober, but when she returned to America, she returned to heroin. David saw her shoot up once and the relationship was over. 

Returning to the heroin again began her rapid spiral towards death. Fellow bandmate Sam Andrew told biographer Ellis Amburn that "She was visibly deteriorating and she looked bloated. She was like a parody of what she was at her best. I put it down to her drinking too much and I felt a tinge of fear for her well-being. Her singing was real flabby, no edge at all." 

The day before her death, Janis visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track of a song she planned to record the following day, "Buried Alive in the Blues." That evening, she drove her Porsche to the West Hollywood venue called Barney's Beanery and she met up with Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman. Janis ate a bowl of chili and downed several drinks. She left the club after midnight with Ken Pearson, the organist for Full Tilt, and they headed back to the Landmark Motor Hotel. When Janis didn't show up for recording the following day, October 4th, Janis' road manager and friend John Byrne Cook went to the hotel to check on her and he found her dead on the floor of her room. The heroin hit her quickly as she was still clutching the change in her hand from buying cigarettes. She was wearing a nightgown and had been dead for 18 hours. Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi conducted the autopsy on Janis and found that her death was due to a heroin overdose. She had also been drinking, which probably contributed. Several other customers of Janis' dealer also died that same weekend, so it is thought that this batch of heroin was more potent than usual. Joplin was cremated in the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in Los Angeles. She wanted her ashes scattered and that was done from a plane that flew over the Pacific Ocean and along Stinson Beach. The album Pearl was released six weeks after her death. Janis would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. In 2005, she and was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame came in 2013. Peggy Caserta was a close friend of Janis and there are those who claim the two were lovers. Part of this belief came from a memoir that Caserta wrote in 1973, "Going Down With Janis," in which she wrote via a ghostwriter that the women were lovers. Caserta had owned the boutique Mnasidika in the late 1960s and Joplin shopped there for clothes. The two became fast friends and shared a heroin addiction. Caserta later disavowed the book and denied a romantic relationship. She wrote "I Ran Into Some Trouble" in 2018, to set the record straight. It is probably likely that Joplin was bisexual. 

Janice had a provision in her will that she wanted a party thrown for her in place of a funeral. That wake party was held on October 26, 1970 at The Lion Share, which was a legendary live music club in San Anselmo, California. Joplin had set aside $2,500 in her will for this party and it was a real blowout, with hashish laced brownies being passed around and the Grateful Dead playing. Joplin's closest friends were there, as was her sister Laura.  

Janis had joined her friend Jimi Hendrix in the 27 Club. He had died just 16 days before her. Jim Morrison would join the club a few months later. The 27 Club is an exclusive Rock & Roll club that no one actually wants to be a member of since it means you're dead at 27. What makes this club unique is the level of talent included within it. Robert Johnson is considered the first member. Amy Winehouse is probably the most recent. Brian Jones was a founding member of the Rolling Stones and died from drowning in his pool while under the influence of drugs and alcohol in 1969. Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson was a member of Canned Heat and died of a drug overdose in 1970. Founding member of the Grateful Dead, Ron McKernan, died in 1973 from internal bleeding due to cirrhosis caused by his heavy drinking. Kurt Cobain died in 1994 after shooting himself with a shotgun...maybe. And then Amy Winehouse overdosed in 2011. Was this some kind of curse that felled these 27-year-old musicians. Clearly, they lived hard and fast, but had they made a deal with the Devil? 

Whatever the case may be for Janis - and with her desire to get out of her small Texas town and the mundane life it offered we believe she would be a prime candidate for soul exchange - her spirit still seems to be here, especially at the hotel where she died. Her death was quick and possibly her spirit is confused about what happened and doesn't accept that she is dead. And she might be sticking around because Room 105 has been left mostly as she left it, with guests leaving messages for her on the wall in the closet. Guests and employees have reported unexplained sounds, a very heavy feeling and some have even seen her apparition. The lobby has pictures of all the famous people that have stayed here and it is said that if mention Janis' name in the lobby, some of the pictures go flying. 

Jen Danczak stayed in the room in 2024 and she found the duvet cover completely off the bed. When she reported it to the front desk, they double checked if the room had been cleaned and it had. That was when the person at the front desk told her that they won't go into that room at night. The manager told her, "Sometimes you have to knock [on the door] or she doesn't open the door. The other day these people checked in and then came down and said they couldn't get the door open. I asked if they knocked first and they said "no." I went to the door, knocked and it opened for me." There was a little EMF activity. 

Findadeath post on Reddit, "This guy I was talking to in the lobby, started telling me stories about various incidents that he believe are Janis, but only when someone says something about her. Those 8 by 10’s of celebrities that grace every single business in LA, fly off the walls. Doors slam shut, etc. Nothing too destructive, but again only when someone discusses Janis. One other incident involved the phone lines going nuts at 3 in the morning. Every single phone from every single room started ringing at the switchboard. The guy calls the owner, and the owner is just as dumbfounded. Then the owner says, 'It must be Janis.' Instantly the phones stopped ringing. A little creepy. Then as we’re talking, the phone starts ringing. He says, 'Good evening, Highland Gardens Hotel.' No one there. It happens again, and again, and again. At least 6 times. It wasn’t major creepiness, but it was kinda cool to think it just might be Janis." 

Strange RV Tours stayed there once and the very heavy closet doors opened on their own. They told the night manager that they just had something strange happen and he asked if the closet doors opened on their own and they said "yes." The manager said that this happens nearly every night and that this is Janis. The next morning they heard a knocking right in front of them on a cupboard in the kitchenette. It happened a second time too.

So Danny Bodaduce and his wife, Amy, stayed in Janis' room in 2019. Amy has a blog called The Clipboard of Fun and she wrote, "Earlier in the day, I had put a water bottle in the fridge. I went to get it several hours later and it was completely covered in slime. I’ve been in my share of skeezy Hollywood apartments (let’s not discuss my past) but I’ve never seen anything like this. I googled “slime paranormal activity” and it turns out this is a thing. I found a whole bunch of stuff about substances, like slime (ie “Slimer” from the Ghostbusters), denoting a spiritual presence. The other thing. Danny had situated himself in bed in a spot most conducive to watching TV. This left me in the predicament of either sleeping alone in the other bed or in the same bed but right next to the Janis death spot. What’s a girl to do? I was too spooked to sleep by myself but promised I wouldn’t, out of respect, touch or walk on the spot where she passed. So I was shaken when I woke up in the middle of the night with my right arm fully extended, hovering over the sacred spot." 

Janis had an incomparable talent. One can only imagine the heights she would've risen to had she not died so early. She lived life hard and fast and ended up dying alone in a hotel room. That's not how anyone wants to die. Is her spirit still here for that reason? That is for you to decide!