Nina Simone Started Writing a Song About Janis Joplin — Then She Told the Audience Why She Stopped

Nina Simone Started Writing a Song About Janis Joplin — Then She Told the Audience Why She Stopped

On July 3rd, 1976, Nina Simone sat down at a piano in Switzerland and told a live audience something she probably shouldn’t have said out loud. The night before she had gone to see a documentary about Janis Joplin, six years dead by then, and it had shaken her enough that she’d sat down afterward and started writing a song about her.

 Then she stopped, and instead of finishing it privately, she stood in front of a paying crowd at one of the most prestigious music festivals in the world and told them exactly why she gave up. What does it mean when a legendary artist starts writing a tribute to another legendary artist and then decides out loud that the audience isn’t worthy of hearing it? This is one of the strangest, most honest on stage confessions in music history, and it happened almost by accident.

 To understand why that night went the way it did, you have to understand where Nina Simone was in 1976. She had left the United States. She was living in exile, having recently come from Liberia, seeking what she herself described as terrible, wonderful, peacefulness in Switzerland. She hadn’t played the Montreux Jazz Festival in years, and she opened the show by informing the crowd flatly, “I haven’t seen you for many years.

 Since 1968, I have decided I will do no more jazz festivals. That decision has not changed.” This was not a woman in a mood to perform pleasantries, and the first song she played that night was “Little Girl Blue,” the same Rodgers and Hart standard from 1935 that had become the title track of her own 1959 debut album, and the same fragile ballad Janis Joplin had rearranged and made her own on the Cosmic Blues album in 1969.

Two women, six years and a continent apart, opening two different chapters of their careers with the exact same quiet aching song. Early in the set, Simone brought up something that had clearly been eating at her. “You know I’ve made 35 albums,” she told the crowd, “but they bootlegged 70. Everybody took a chunk of me.

” This was not a throwaway line. This was a woman doing the math on a career’s worth of exploitation out loud to strangers who had paid to hear her sing. And it’s the exact frame of mind she was in when she brought up Janis Joplin. “Yesterday,” she said, “I went to see Janis Joplin’s film.” She meant a documentary, almost certainly Janis, the 1974 film compiled from concert and interview footage released 4 years after Joplin’s death.

 “And what distressed me the most,” Simone continued, “I started to write a song about it, but I decided you weren’t worth it because I figured most of you are here for the festival. Applefaceism sickton. Read that sentence again. A song written in real time in a hotel room about one of the most mythologized deaths in American music and then abandoned specifically because Simone decided the audience in front of her hadn’t earned the right to hear it.

 She kept talking. “Anyway, the point is that it pained me to see how hard she worked,” Simone said, “because she got hooked into a feeling and it wasn’t on drugs. She got hooked into a feeling and she played to corpses, if you know what I mean.” And then, according to multiple accounts of the performance, she burst into sudden unrestrained laughter, looking directly out at her own audience as she said it, the joke landing on the exact people sitting motionless in front of her.

 She wasn’t just talking about Janis Joplin’s audiences in 1969. She was talking about the room she was standing in right then. This is one of the most quietly savage things ever said on a concert stage, and it was aimed at the very people who’d paid to hear it. Has an artist ever said something on stage in the moment that stopped you cold? Something raw and unscripted that felt more honest than anything rehearsed.

I’d love to hear which performance did that to you in the comments. The night wasn’t finished revealing itself. Later in the show, still visibly unsettled, Simone scanned the crowd looking for someone specific, David Bowie, her close friend who had recently moved to nearby Blonay, Switzerland.

 She and Bowie had struck up a genuine friendship 2 years earlier after an accidental meeting at a New York club, a friendship deep enough that Bowie would go on to cover her song Wild Is Wild for his own album Station to Station that same year. She assumed he’d be in the audience. He wasn’t. When the crowd told her so, she grew visibly upset.

 “David Bowie is my dear friend,” she insisted. “He lives with you,” meaning nearby, “and I wanted to know if he was here. He’s not here, obviously. He’ll still be driving from some damn place because if David was here, he’d tell me he was here.” Two absent figures haunting the same performance. One gone forever, one simply running late. Simone’s grief and her irritation somehow occupying the exact same emotional register that night.

 And there’s one more detail from that Montreux set that connects everything, hiding inside a song that wasn’t even about Janis Joplin originally. Simone performed her own reworking of Janis Ian Stars, and inside it she inserted a line that ranks a specific lineage of women who told the truth through their voices.

“I’m trying to tell my story. Janis Ian told it very well. Janis Joplin told it even better. Billie Holiday told it even better. A direct hierarchy spoken aloud on stage placing Janis Joplin inside a lineage that Simone clearly considered sacred. And the connection runs both directions.

 Janis Joplin, long before any of this, had said her own version of the same thing about Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. They’re so subtle they can milk you with two notes. They can make you feel like they told you the whole universe. When Janis first moved to San Francisco to chase music, she brought almost nothing with her. But one of the few things she carried was Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, treated by every account like something close to scripture.

 Two singers, one white and southern, one black and a generation older, both privately building their entire artistic identities around the same handful of foundational voices, Holiday most of all, without ever performing together, without much record of ever meeting. And then, six years after Janis died in a hotel room in Switzerland, Nina Simone sat down to write about her, felt the weight of it too heavily to finish, and instead stood on a stage and simply told a room full of strangers the truth about why the song was never completed. As far

as the historical record shows, it doesn’t exist anywhere as a finished piece. What exists instead is something rarer, a legendary artist live and unscripted explaining exactly what another legendary artist’s death had done to her and refusing to perform grief the audience hadn’t earned. If this story gave you a new way to hear either of these two women, that’s exactly what this channel exists to find, and subscribing means you won’t miss the next one.

 And if you know someone who loves Nina Simone or Janis Joplin and has never heard this Montreux night, send them this video. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.