He Read Poetry to Lions at the Zoo — Then He Co-Wrote Janis Joplin’s Only Number-One Song D

There was a poet in San Francisco who used to stand at the lion enclosure at the zoo and read his poetry directly at the lions, growling, roaring, performing what he called beast language, an invented tongue meant to speak to the animal underneath every human being. That same poet co-wrote Janis Joplin’s only number one single, and according to his closest friends, he made more money from that one song than from his entire published body of work.

Over 60 books of poetry, plays, and prose. His name was Michael McClure, and this is the story of the strangest, most unlikely songwriting credit in rock history. Have you ever made something on a whim, a joke, a doodle, a throwaway line that ended up outliving everything else you ever worked hard for? That’s this entire story. Stay with me.

Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas in 1932, and by the late 1950s, he had planted himself firmly at the center of the Beat movement in San Francisco. He wasn’t a famous name to the general public. He was famous to the people who mattered most in that specific world, a poet’s poet, someone the writer Barry Miles once called the prince of the San Francisco scene.

He read alongside Allen Ginsberg at the legendary Six Gallery reading in 1955, the night that launched the Beat movement into public consciousness. His poetry pushed language somewhere strange and physical. In 1964, he published Ghost Tantras, a book of what he called beast language, poems built from growls, grunts, and animal sound woven into human speech.

Then he took it outside. He went to the San Francisco Zoo and read his beast language poems aloud to the actual lions. Watch to see and for a recording of it survives to this day. This was not a metaphor. He stood at the enclosure and roared poetry at real living lions, testing whether his invented language could reach something underneath language itself.

This was the mind that would, a few years later, end up co-writing one of the most recognizable songs of the entire 1960s. McClure didn’t just orbit the literary world. He was woven directly into the counterculture exploding around him. He read at the Human Being in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, the massive countercultural gathering that essentially announced the Summer of Love to the world.

He became a close friend and mentor to Jim Morrison of The Doors, so close that the two of them co-wrote a film script together based on McClure’s own novel, The Adept, with Morrison intending to star. He knew Bob Dylan well enough that he was the person who first publicly called Dylan the Poet’s Poet in a piece for Rolling Stone.

Ginsberg, Burroughs, Dylan, Morrison, and moving through the same overlapping circle of San Francisco friendships in the late 1960s, Janis Joplin. Here’s where the story gets a little tangled, and honestly, that tangle is part of what makes it so alive. There are multiple accounts of exactly how the song Mercedes Benz came together.

Bobby Womack in his own autobiography described a specific moment riding in his car with Janis when a line simply spilled out of her. That memory is real and it’s his, but the official songwriting credit on the record, the one printed on Pearl to this day, lists three names: Janis Joplin, Michael McClure, and Bobby Womack.

The most widely told version of that credit’s origin goes like this. On a night in 1970, Janis was hanging out with McClure and Neuwirth, and the three of them started riffing together, half joking, building a little a cappella song about wanting nice things. A Mercedes-Benz, a color TV, a night on the town.

Instead of asking God for anything as heavy as love or faith, it was funny. It was disposable. It was the kind of thing friends invented bar and forget about by morning. Except this time, someone remembered it. On October 1st, 1970, just 3 days before she died, Janis Joplin walked into Sunset Sound Recorders and sang that little joke song completely a cappella.

No band, no instruments, just her voice alone in the room singing a bar napkin melody about a Mercedes-Benz. It was one of the last thing she ever recorded. When Pearl was released in January 1971, 3 months after her death, Mercedes-Benz was on it, credited to Joplin, McClure, and Neuwirth. A joke between friends now printed permanently on one of the best-selling albums in American music history.

The poet Robert Creeley, one of McClure’s oldest friends and one of the most respected voices of post-war American poetry, made an observation about McClure that has been repeated ever since because it’s both funny and a little bit devastating. Creeley said that Michael McClure earned more money from the royalties of Mercedes-Benz than he ever did from his own books.

Sit with that for a second. A man who wrote over 60 published works across seven decades, who helped define an entire literary movement, who read ghost tantras to actual lions, who mentored Jim Morrison, made more money from one drunken bar joke with Janis Joplin than from his life’s serious work.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever created almost by accident that ended up mattering more than something you worked incredibly hard on? I’d love to hear it in the comments. I think almost everyone has one of these stories. When Janis Joplin died on October 4th, 1970, Michael McClure lost a friend who had been part of his overlapping world of poets, musicians, and Hells Angels for years.

The same San Francisco ecosystem that also connected him to Frank Reynolds, the Hells Angels secretary whose memoirs he co-wrote, and to Jim Morrison who would follow Janis into the same tragic pattern less than a year later. Three deaths within 13 months. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, and Michael McClure had a genuine personal thread running through at least two of them.

He kept writing for another 50 years. He taught poetry at the California College of the Arts for 43 years. He published new books into his 80s. He died in Oakland Hills, California on May 4th, 2020 at the age of 87. His obituaries listed scope of his literary achievement, decades of books, plays, and collaborations with some of the most important artists of the 20th century.

And somewhere in nearly every one of them, alongside all of that, was this: co-writer of the Janis Joplin song Mercedes Benz, a joke on a bar napkin that outlived and outearned almost everything else he ever made. “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” Three days before she died, a cappella, nothing but her voice.

And somewhere behind that voice, a beat poet who once roared poetry at lions, laughing along at a bar table, having no idea he just written the words that would end up printed on one of the most important albums of the century. If this story changed the way you’ll hear that song, that’s exactly what this channel exists to find, and subscribing makes sure the next one finds you.

And if you know someone who loves Mercedes-Benz and has never heard the name Michael McClure, send them this video. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.