She Called City Hall About a Marriage License — One Month Later She Was Dead D

In September 1970, Janis Joplin called City Hall. She was asking about a marriage license. She had found the man she wanted to marry or believed she had, and she was making the most ordinary phone call of her extraordinary life. One month later, she was dead. The man she was going to marry became someone that almost no one has told the complete story of until now.

His name was Seth Morgan. He was 21 years old in the summer of 1970. He was a UC Berkeley dropout. He was, by his own account, delivering cocaine to a house in Marin County when he first met Janis Joplin. She opened the door. That was July 1970. Three months later, she was dead. And what happened to him in the 20 years that followed is one of the stranger parallel stories in rock history.

Seth Morgan was not a nobody. He was born on April 4th, 1949 into a family that understood privilege and literature as the same thing. His father was George Frederick Morgan, a soap fortune heir and a poet. The Morgan household was the kind of household where E. E. Cummings and Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas came for dinner.

Seth grew up in that world, good-looking, charming, the specific ease of someone who had never had to calculate whether he was welcome in a room because every room he entered had always been arranged for his benefit. He dropped out of Berkeley in 1970. He started dealing cocaine, and one afternoon in July, he drove to Marin County with a delivery.

Janis Joplin opened the door. What happened next was not what either of them expected. They started spending time together, not the rock and roll version of time together, not the road, not the parties, not the performance, the other kind. Laura Joplin, her sister, would later say that in the fall of 1970, Janis had ideas about trying to live a more balanced life.

Less touring, less of everything that was consuming her. She told friends about quiet nights at home with Seth. She told people they had agreed to get married, to have children. She had been mythologizing the picket fence since Port Arthur, the reliable husband, the stable home, the life that was not a stage.

She had been running toward it and away from it for a decade. Seth Morgan looked in the summer of 1970 like the picket fence might finally be real. She called City Hall about a marriage license. She was serious. The Pearl sessions at Sunset Sound were the best recording experience of her life. Producer Paul Rothschild. The Full Tilt Boogie Band.

The specific focused energy of someone who knows for the first time exactly what they are capable of in a studio. Her road manager, John Byrne Cook, would later say she had told him how much it was blowing her away working with Rothschild, that their work together was opening up her understanding of ways to use her voice that were going to stand her in really good stead in the years to come. The music was extraordinary.

The relationship was more complicated. Seth Morgan visited Sunset Sound Recorders for eight of her many rehearsals and sessions, eight out of months of recording. He was engaged to the most famous female rock singer in America, and he showed up for eight sessions. The picket fence was already showing its cracks.

On October 3rd, 1970, the night before she died, Janis learned that Seth had been seen with other women at a party in Marin County. She went to Barney’s Beanery with her band. She had a few drinks. She went back to the Landmark Hotel. She had made plans for that night. Seth was supposed to come. Peggy Caserta, her long-time on-again, off-again companion, was also supposed to come. Neither of them showed up.

She was alone. She was the most famous female rock singer in America, engaged to be married, recording the best album of her career, and on the last night of her life, she was alone in a hotel room in Hollywood because the two people who were supposed to come had made other plans.

She had four dollar bills and two quarters in her hand when they found her. She had bought cigarettes from the vending machine in the lobby and come back to the room and never got to light one. The picket fence did not arrive in time. Seth Morgan said, in the years that followed, that they would have married had it not been for her untimely checkout.

He said it casually, the specific way people say things when they are not ready to feel the full weight of what they are saying. What came after is documented in a 1991 Esquire article called Seth Morgan’s Last Ride. He got on his Harley almost immediately after her death. He crashed it into a house in San Francisco that had once belonged to Jack London.

His passenger, a new girlfriend, had her face partially paralyzed in the crash. He said later that he married her in part so she wouldn’t sue him. That marriage did not last. He moved to San Francisco. He found work as a barker at strip clubs. He developed an addiction to heroin.

He met a restaurant hostess and talked her into prostitution. He committed 12 to 15 armed robberies, including one in which he stabbed a bystander’s hand to the floor with a knife. In 1977, he was arrested. He served time. The man who had grown up with Dylan Thomas coming for dinner was now in prison for armed robbery. He had been Janis Joplin’s fiance.

She had called City Hall about a marriage license. He had not shown up on the last night of her life. In prison, he won the PEN essay contest for convicts. Something was still there, underneath everything he had become. In 1986, after his release, he moved to New Orleans. He got sober. He went to AA meetings.

He stopped dealing and pimping. He started writing. He wrote an 1,100 page manuscript that Random House trimmed to 390 pages and published in 1990 under the title Homeboy. The New York Times called it Joycean. The reviews were excellent. Inside the novel, a character based on Janis Joplin, described as a flamboyantly dressed prostitute, the woman who had called City Hall about a marriage license, the woman who wanted quiet nights at home and children and the picket fence, transmuted by the man who was going to marry her into a fictional street worker. Whether this was his grief or his guilt or his way of processing something he could not process any other way, only he knew. And he did not have long to explain. On October 17th, 1990, Seth Morgan and his then girlfriend were riding his Harley

over a bridge in New Orleans. The motorcycle hit a dividing post. Both of them died. October 17th, 1990, 20 years and 13 days after Janis died, the year Homeboy was published, the year he had given book signing engagements in San Francisco, the same city where 14 years earlier he had stabbed a man during a robbery.

The year it seemed like he had finally genuinely come back. A police officer named Carmine Menchell visited the scene. He said, “If she’d been wearing a helmet, she might have lived. If he’d been wearing one, he might have had an open casket.” He was 41 years old. Homeboy had been out for months.

He was working on his second novel when he died. Janis Joplin became immortal. Pearl went to number one. Me and Bobby McGee went to number one. She is still one of the top-selling vocalists in American music history, 55 years after her death. Seth Morgan became a ghost, a footnote in her story. A cocaine delivery that turned into an engagement that turned into a marriage license inquiry that turned into the last night when he didn’t show up.

She wanted the picket fence. She called City Hall. He made other plans. One month later, she was gone. 20 years later, so was he. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.