Janis Joplin’s 27th Birthday: The Party Where Nobody Showed Up D

On January 27th, 1970, Janis Joplin turned 27 years old. She had been the most famous female rock singer in America for 3 years. She had played Woodstock. She had stopped 5,000 people at Monterey from breathing. She had been on the cover of every magazine that mattered. On her 27th birthday, she organized a small party at her apartment in San Francisco.

She bought food. She bought drinks. She called people and told them to come. By 9:00 in the evening, it was clear that most of them were not going to. The apartment on Larkspur was not a large apartment. It was the kind of place that Janis had chosen because it was in the neighborhood she loved, and because it had windows that looked out over the city, and because she spent so little time in it that its size was largely irrelevant.

She was almost always somewhere else, on tour, in a studio, in transit between one version of herself and the next. The apartment was where she went between those versions. She had decorated it in the way she decorated everything, without restraint, without a coherent plan, with the specific accumulated aesthetic of someone who buys things because they respond to them in the moment, rather than because they fit into any larger scheme.

On the evening of January 27th, 1970, she had put food out on the table in the kitchen, nothing elaborate, the food of someone who wanted people to feel welcome, rather than impressed. Cheese and bread and fruit, and the Southern Comfort that was always present in her spaces, the way certain objects become inseparable from the people who carry them.

She had put records on, not her own records, Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, the music she had listened to in the roadhouses along the Texas-Louisiana border when she was 17 years old, and learning what a voice could be used for. She had told people to come at 7:00. By 7:30, she had heard from three of them.

One was sick. One was in Los Angeles and had forgotten what day it was. One did not respond in any way that suggested the message had been received. She sat in the kitchen and looked at the food on the table and listened to Bessie Smith and did not call anyone else. Not because there was nobody else to call.

Because calling someone to confirm whether they were coming to your birthday party required a specific kind of vulnerability that Janis Joplin would extend to a stage in front of 20,000 people without hesitation and could not extend to a telephone in her own kitchen. The stage was the safe place. The kitchen was the dangerous one.

By 8:00, two people had arrived. A woman named Linda, who had been one of her closest friends since the early Haight-Ashbury days, and who had come not because she had been reminded, but because she had remembered on her own and had shown up with a bottle of wine and a record she thought Janis would want to hear.

And a man named Paul, who had been in the periphery of Janis’s world for 2 years and who had come because Linda had called him on the way over and told him to. They sat in the kitchen. They ate the food. They drank the Southern Comfort and the wine Linda had brought. They talked. Janis was good company.

She was always good company when she was not performing anything. Funny and direct and genuinely interested in the conversation in the way of someone who had learned early that the conversation was often the best part of any evening. But Linda said later that there was something underneath the good company that night that she had noticed and had not known how to address.

Not sadness, exactly. The specific quality of someone who has understood something about their situation that they had not previously understood and are sitting with the understanding quietly. Around 9:00, Janice looked at the food on the table, the food she had bought for more people than had come, and said, “I think this is everyone.

” Linda said, “Yes.” Janice said, “That’s fine.” She said it in the specific tone of someone for whom it was not entirely fine and who had decided that making it fine was the more available option. Paul said, “More food for us.” Janice laughed, the real laugh, not the performance, the one that came from finding something genuinely funny in a moment that contained something that was not funny at all.

She said, “Yes.” She said, “More food for us.” They stayed until after midnight, Linda and Paul, two people in an apartment on Larkspur Street in San Francisco on the 27th birthday of the most famous female rock singer in America. They talked about everything and nothing, about music and about the city and about the year ahead and about the things that people talk about when they are comfortable with each other and the evening is long enough to get past the topics that have obvious end points and into the ones that don’t. At some point during that evening, Janice said something that Linda remembered for the rest of her life. They had been talking about fame, about what it actually was as opposed to what it looked like from the outside. Janice said, “The strange thing about it is that it expands the room and empties it at the same time.”

Linda said, “What do you mean?” Janice said, “When I was nobody, the rooms were small, but the people in them were there because they wanted to be.” She said, “Now the rooms are enormous, and I can’t always tell who is there because they want to be and who is there because the room is large.” She said, “Do you understand what I mean?” Linda said, “Yes.

” Janice said, “Tonight the room is small again.” She looked at Linda. She looked at Paul. She said, “And you’re both here because you wanted to be.” She said, “That means more than the large rooms.” She said it simply, without drama, without requiring anything from it. Just as a fact she had arrived at and wanted to say out loud to the two people who had made it true.

Paul said, “We’ll always show up.” Janice said, “I know.” She said, “That’s why I invited more people.” She smiled. She said, “I wanted you to have someone to talk to while you waited for me to finish being glad you were here.” Linda laughed. Paul laughed. Janice laughed. The real one. The one that cost nothing and gave everything.

They stayed until after midnight. Then Linda and Paul left. Janice stood in the kitchen after they were gone and looked at the food on the table. The food that had been bought for more people than had come. And she put it away. She did not throw it away. She put it away carefully, the way you put things away when you intend to use them later.

She turned the records off. She sat by the window that looked out over the city. San Francisco at midnight in January 1970 was the city that had taken her in when Port Arthur had finished making her into a target. It was the city where she had stood in the back of clubs and bars and watched other people sing until she understood what she was supposed to do with the thing inside her.

It was the city where Big Brother had been waiting for a singer and Chet Helms had called her name and she had got on a bus and arrived and stood in a rehearsal room and opened her mouth and changed the direction of everything. She sat by the window and looked at it. She was 27 years old. She had 9 months left.

She did not know that. She thought she had the rest of her life ahead. The album she was going to make, the break she was going to take, the Brazil she was going to return to, the version of herself that existed on the other side of finishing Pearl and setting it down and finding out who she was when she was not carrying it.

She thought all of that was ahead. 9 months. She sat by the window and looked at the city and thought about what she had said to Linda. Tonight the room is small again. She thought about the large rooms, Monterey, Woodstock, the sold-out arenas, the stages that had given her the thing that no other context had ever reliably given her.

The knowledge that she was enough. She thought about the small room, two people who had come because they wanted to, who would always show up. She thought about which one felt more like home. She thought about it for a long time by the window in the apartment on Larksburg on her 27th birthday. She did not arrive at a conclusion that she could have stated clearly, but something settled in her that had not been settled before the evening started.

The specific settling of someone who has been reminded of something they had temporarily lost track of. That the size of the room was not the measure of the thing. That two people who showed up because they wanted to were worth more than 20 who showed up because the room was large. That she had known this when she was nobody standing in small rooms in Port Arthur and Austin and the early hate.

That she still knew it. That fame had not taken it from her, only temporarily obscured it. She went to bed sometime after 2:00. She had a session the following morning. Pearl was waiting. She had work to do. Janis Joplin died 9 months and 6 days after her 27th birthday. Linda was one of the first people called.

She sat with the information for a long time. She thought about the kitchen, the food on the table, the Bessie Smith records, the two of them and Paul staying until after midnight. She thought about what Janis had said. Tonight, the room is small again, and you’re both here because you wanted to be.

That means more than the large rooms. Linda has said in interviews given in the years since that she thinks about that birthday more than she thinks about any concert she attended, any recording session she witnessed, any of the large room moments that the world considers the defining events of Janis Joplin’s life.

She thinks about the kitchen, the food for more people than came, the records, the two of them and Paul, the small room. She says, “That was the real one.” She says, “The stages were extraordinary. The voice was extraordinary. What she did in those large rooms was extraordinary.” She says, “But the real one was the kitchen on Larkspur Street on January 27th, 1970.

Two people who showed up because they wanted to. Food for more than came. Bessie Smith on the record player. The city through the window.” She says, “That was Janis. Not the performance. The person who put food on the table and hoped people would come and was fine or close enough to fine when most of them didn’t.

Because two did. And two was enough. It was always enough. She had just needed a small room and a long evening to remember that.”