I Want You to Tell the Truth — What Janis Joplin Asked Her Publicist 6 Weeks Before She Died D

In August 1970, in a bar in New York City, Janice Joplain grabbed a woman’s hands across the table and made a request that would shape the next 40 years of that woman’s life. It wasn’t a request for money. It wasn’t a request for loyalty or silence or protection, the things famous people usually ask of the people who work for them.

She asked for the opposite of protection. 6 weeks later, Janice Joplain was dead. And the woman she asked spent the rest of her own life keeping that promise. So completely that when she herself died 40 years later, almost to the month, Janice Joplain’s voice was the last thing she heard.

Think about the people in your life you trust enough to want the unflattering truth from them, not just the comfortable version. That’s exactly what this story is about. And almost nobody knows the woman at the center of it. Her name was Myra Freriedman. Myra Freriedman did not come from rock and roll. She was born and raised in St.

Louis, majored in music at Northwestern University, and worked first for Deca Records and then Colombia, the buttoned up professional side of the music business, press releases, scheduling, the machinery behind the scenes. In 1968, she went to work for Albert Grossman, the same manager who ran Bob Dylan’s career, the most powerful and most guarded man in the business.

Her job, publicist for Janice Joplain. On paper, this meant answering phones, managing reporters, controlling a narrative. In reality, it meant something much harder. It meant standing in the gap between a wild, exaggerated public image, the hardrinking, hard-living rock and roll hippie chick that Rolling Stone loved to print, and an actual, exhausted, complicated human being who needed someone in her corner who wasn’t just managing her brand.

Myra Freriedman became that person. Here’s what made her different from every other publicist in that world. She didn’t just protect Janice from the press. She was willing to call Janice out on her excesses, on what Freriedman later described as her occasional phoniness, on the constant drug use everyone around her was too afraid or too invested to mention out loud.

Most people in Janice Joplain’s orbit by 1970 fell into two categories. People who wanted something from her and people who were too dazzled to tell her the truth. Myra Freriedman was neither. She was by every account that survives one of the very few people who tried harder than anyone to actually save her.

And that friendship, the real complicated, occasionally difficult kind, is exactly why what happened in that New York bar in August 1970 carries the weight it does. They were sitting together 6 weeks before the end, just the two of them. And Janice said something that Myra Freriedman would carry for the rest of her life. She said, “I want you to tell the truth about the drugs, about everything.

I mean, really tell the truth.” Read that again. This wasn’t a stranger asking. This was Janice Joplain at the absolute height of her fame, asking her own publicist, the person whose entire professional function was to manage her image to eventually tear that image down and replace it with something real.

She wasn’t asking for a flattering memoir. She was asking to be seen completely, even the parts that weren’t beautiful. Myra Freriedman said yes. Neither of them said the other thing out loud, the thing hanging in the air of that bar. That this conversation had the unmistakable shape of someone settling something before it was too late.

6 weeks later, it was too late. On October 4th, 1970, the phone rang at Albert Gman’s office. Myra Freriedman was the person who answered. She was by professional necessity one of the very first people outside the immediate scene to know that Janice Joplain was dead. And then almost immediately one of the people responsible for managing the flood of press calls that followed.

The same phones she had spent two years defending Janice from were now ringing with the story of her death. She had to be professional. She had to be composed. She had to do her job on the single worst day of it. And underneath all of that, she was also carrying something nobody else on those calls knew about.

A promise made six weeks earlier in a bar that she now had to figure out how to keep. It took her nearly 3 years. Myra Freriedman spent 1971 and 1972 writing what would become buried alive the biography of Janice Joplain working from memory from her own notes from a closeness to the story that no outside biographer could ever replicate.

It was not an easy book to write and it was not an easy book for everyone to accept. The poet James Dicki wrote her a furious letter accusing the project of glorifying Janice through publicity of being, in his words, disgusting commercialism, of indulging young people to death through the very act of trying to understand one of them.

Myra Freriedman held her ground. She wasn’t writing a glorification. She was keeping a promise made across a bar table by a woman who specifically did not want to be glorified. She wanted the truth, the drugs, the loneliness, the specific fragility underneath the bravado told plainly without the mythmaking that had already started swallowing the real person whole.

Buried alive was published in 1973. It was nominated for a national book award. It won the Ascap deems Taylor award for music writing. Rolling Stone called it one of the best books about a rock figure. better, the review said, than Norman Mail’s famous biography of Marilyn Monroe. The New York Daily News wrote that they could almost hear Janice laugh reading it.

But the response that mattered most to Myra Freriedman wasn’t from critics. It was from readers. Letters arrived, dozens of them, some handwritten, some from people who had never cared about Janice Joplain before, some from people who had actively disliked her reputation, all saying some version of the same thing.

This book changed how I understand her. This book made her human to me for the first time. That was the promise finally kept. If you’ve ever kept a difficult promise to someone after they were gone, something that took years, something almost nobody else knew you were carrying, I’d genuinely like to hear about it in the comments.

Stories like that deserve to be told, too. Myra Freriedman spent the following decades as one of the great unofficial keepers of Janice Joplain’s actual history, corresponding with later biographers, including scholar Alice Eckles, whose own acclaimed 1999 biography Scars of Sweet Paradise was written with Freriedman’s direct help.

She never stopped protecting the truth of who Janice really was. Even as Hollywood spent the 90s failing again and again to turn the story into a movie. She kept every letter, every clipping, every piece of the record for 40 years. Myra Freriedman died on October 16th, 2010. 40 years almost to the month after Janice.

A friend who was there described her final hours surrounded by people who loved her. With Janice Joplain’s music playing softly in the room, “Myra Freriedman was singing out of this life,” her friend wrote, “and into the next, the same way Janice herself once sang for an entire generation.” Think about that circularity for a moment.

A promise made in a bar in 1970, tell the truth. 40 years of keeping it. And at the very end, the same voice that asked for that promise was the last sound in the room. Janice Joplain is remembered correctly for her voice. But there was another voice working quietly for four decades to make sure the world understood what was underneath it.

The fragile, funny, generous, complicated human being who once grabbed a friend’s hands across a table and asked for the one thing almost nobody in her position ever asks for. The truth. If you learn something new today about the people who actually knew Janice, not the myth, the real woman, that’s exactly what this channel exists to find.

Subscribing helps make sure the next one reaches you. And if you know someone who only knows the legend and not the story behind it, send them this one. Myra Freriedman spent her whole life making sure people like that could finally hear it. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you