Janis Joplin Came to Dick Cavett’s Show Four Months Before She Died and Said Something No One D

Janice Joplain appeared on the Dick Cavitt show for the second time in the summer of 1970, four months before she died, and she said something about loneliness that the studio received as the kind of thing Janice Joplain said. It meant more than that. The two Cavid appearances in 1969 and 1970 caught Joplain at different moments.

The first was after the explosion of Woodstock, where she had performed in front of hundreds of thousands of people and been described as the most electrifying female performer of her generation. The second was more complicated. By the summer of 1970, the band she had built her reputation with, Big Brother and the Holding Company, was long since dissolved.

She was performing with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, a tighter and more musically sophisticated arrangement that suited the direction her music was moving. She was also, by accounts of those close to her, in a period of considerable personal difficulty. on Cavitt show in the second appearance the conversation moved to Port Arthur, Texas where Joplain had grown up where she had been by her own and others accounts systematically rejected as an adolescent for being too loud, too strange, too interested in the wrong things. Cavitt asked her about it in the way he asked about everything directly and without apparent agenda. She told him she was going back to Port Arthur. Her 10-year high school reunion was coming up. She was invited. She was going.

I’m going to laugh a lot, she said. And then after a beat. I hope they feel bad. The Janice Joplain who performed with Big Brother and the Holding Company at Mterrey in 1967. The performance that made her nationally famous overnight was not in any simple sense the same person who had been rejected in Port Arthur.

She had been remade or had remade herself by the counterculture and the music and the specific community of San Francisco in the mid 1960s that had for the first time in her life given her somewhere to belong. The voice, that impossible howling blues and gospel and country and rock and all of it voice had always been there.

What the counterculture gave her was permission to use it at full volume without apology, as both a personal expression and a professional tool. She performed as if the performance were the only thing that mattered, with the physical and emotional commitment of someone for whom getting on stage and screaming her truths into a microphone was not a performance, but the most alive she could be.

People who saw her perform described it in terms that were less about music and more about witnessing, as if what was happening on stage was more real than the rest of the concert and more real than most other real things. She was also, by those same accounts, someone for whom being offstage was considerably less comfortable.

The warmth, the wit, the southern bell with feathers, that was real, too. But it was real in the way that things are real when they are also chosen. When a person has decided to be this rather than that, and performs the decision consistently enough that the performance and the person become the same thing.

To understand why that line, I hope they feel bad, was not simply a wise crack, but something more complicated, you have to understand what Port Arthur had actually been. Janice Lynn Joplain was born in Port Arthur, Texas in January 1943. Port Arthur was a refinery town on the Gulf Coast, flat, industrial, deeply conventional in the specific way of small southern and southwestern cities in the post-war era, where conformity was not merely preferred, but enforced through the social machinery of schools and churches and neighborhoods that had very little tolerance for deviation. Joplain was a deviation from very early on. She was overweight as a teenager with acne, with interests in folk music, in beat poetry, in racial integration in

a rigidly segregated city that put her entirely outside the social categories available to her. She was by multiple accounts treated with a cruelty that was not casual but sustained. The specific cruelty that adolescence of a certain era reserved for people who could not or would not perform the expected version of themselves.

She left Port Arthur for the first time at 17 for the University of Texas at Austin. She returned. She left again for San Francisco in 1963. She returned again in the grip of a drug problem that her family had hoped the return would address. She left a final time in 1966 for San Francisco for the hate ashbury scene for the audition with Big Brother in the Holding Company that changed everything.

She never lived in Port Arthur again. She never stopped thinking about it. I’m going to laugh a lot. I hope they feel bad. The room received this as Janice Joplain being Janice Joplain. The wit, the southern directness, the willingness to say the thing that was less acceptable than the polite version.

Cavitt smiled. The audience laughed. The conversation moved on. What the line was also doing underneath the wit was describing an ongoing wound with complete accuracy. She was not performing bravado for the cameras. She was saying that the people in Port Arthur who had treated her as they had treated her mattered to her still decades later after Woodstock, after the records, after everything.

and that the reunion was a specific kind of test she had decided to take. The wanting them to feel bad was not small. It was the honest statement of what the herd actually was. Not abstract, not resolved, not sublimated into art and therefore finished, but still present in the specific individual form in which wounds stay present as the thing you want the specific people who caused it to eventually understand.

She went to Port Arthur. She attended the reunion. She died on October 4th, 1970. She was 27 years old. The album she had been making, the album that contains Me and Bobby McGee and MercedesBenz and Crybaby, was released three months after she died and was heard by more people than anything she had made while she was alive.

By 1970, Joplain was working on the album that would become Pearl, the record released postumously in January 1971 that remains, by most critical assessments, her masterpiece. She had a new band. She was making the music she had been working toward for years. She was also, by accounts of those close to her, in a period of significant fragility.

The drug and alcohol use that had been part of her life since the early San Francisco years had not diminished as she got older. She had periods of sobriety that those who loved her described as transformative glimpses of a quieter, calmer person underneath the performance, who seemed to want things that the performance could not provide.

ordinary companionship, a sustained relationship, the specific comfort of being known by someone who was there because they wanted to be there rather than because the show was on. She was engaged to be married in 1970. The relationship was complicated by the specific complications of being Janice Joplain.

The touring, the performing, the way that the energy required to be what she was on stage left relatively little energy for what she was offstage. On Cavitt show the summer before she died, she talked about Port Arthur and the reunion and the people who had treated her the way they had treated her. She was funny about it.

She was also audibly not over it. The hurt that had been put into her at 17 was still inside the woman who had performed at Woodstock. Not resolved, not healed, not irrelevant, still there. Going back to that second cavitt appearance now, the warmth, the wit, the line about laughing and hoping they feel bad.

What’s audible underneath all of it is something that the room didn’t quite know how to hear. She was not unhappy on Cavitt show. She was not performing happiness over unhappiness. She was genuinely funny and genuinely warm and genuinely engaged with Cavitt who liked her and whom she liked back. What was also true, what the line about Port Arthur made audible, was that the person who had made all of it, who had performed at Woodstock and made the records and been described as the most important female rock performer of her generation, was still the girl from Port Arthur, who had not been invited to sit with the right people at lunch. That person had not disappeared inside

the fame. She had carried her forward. The fame was real. The wound was also real. Both of them got on the plane to Port Arthur for the reunion. Both of them sat in Cavitt’s chair for the interview. Cavitt asked her a question. She answered it honestly. The room laughed because the answer was funny.

The answer was also, for anyone listening carefully enough, a dispatch from somewhere very deep inside the person who was sitting in the chair. The interval between that cavit appearance and her death was approximately 4 months. In those four months, she went to Port Arthur for the reunion.

She continued recording Pearl. She performed several concerts. She maintained the relationship that would have been her marriage. She died in a Hollywood hotel room. Heroin overdose alone the night after a recording session that people who were there described as going well as the record coming together as Joplain in a good place creatively.

The specific combination of factors that produced her death was not visible from the outside in the weeks before it happened. Pearl was released in January 1971. It went to number one on the album charts. Me and Bobby McGee went to number one on the singles charts. The woman who had been rejected in Port Arthur at 17 was 3 months after her death, the most commercially successful she had ever been.

The people at the reunion had no way of knowing when she came back in the summer of 1970 that it would be the last time. She had no way of knowing either. She went and she laughed and she left. Pearl has never gone out of print. It appears on every credible list of the greatest rock albums.

The performances on it recorded in the summer before Joplain died in the sessions that the musicians who were there described as among the best of her career carry the particular quality of work made by someone who knows what they are doing and is doing it completely. Dick Kavitt in the years since has spoken about what he remembers from those two appearances.

The energy, the authenticity, the specific feeling sitting across from her of someone who was not separating herself into a public and a private version, but was simply and at considerable personal cost entirely present. He has said he liked her, that she was different from most of the people who sat in that chair, that the difference was not a quality she performed, but something that simply was.

She went back to Port Arthur. She laughed a lot. 4 months later, she was gone. The album came out after the songs stayed. The line about hoping they feel bad, delivered with a laugh, received as comedy, carrying something heavier underneath, that stayed