The Last Night in the Studio. Janis Joplin Kept Recording a Song Nobody Ever Heard. D

October 1970 The Pearl recording sessions were almost done. Almost. The album that would be released in January 1971 and would reach number one on the Billboard 200 and would produce a number one single and would be described by critics and musicians and ordinary listeners as the most complete artistic statement Janis Joplin ever committed to record, that album was almost finished.

11 songs were essentially complete. The overdubs were done on most of them. The mix was in progress. The album existed. But there were sessions still happening. Late sessions, the kind that recording studios produce in the final weeks of an album’s creation when the daytime hours have yielded everything the daytime hours reliably yield and the night becomes the territory of the remaining work.

Work that is either almost done or that has stalled at the particular point that certain material stalls at when the singer and the producer both know the song is not yet what it needs to be and cannot fully account for why. Janis Joplin was in the studio in those final weeks working. She was working on something that would not make the album.

Something she could not stop returning to. Something she could not declare finished. And something that has not in the 50-plus years since the sessions ended been released for the world to hear. The song she could not finish was not a song she was ambivalent about. She was not returning to it because she was uncertain whether it belonged on the album or because she was not sure the material was strong enough or because she had not decided whether to record it at all.

She was returning to it because it was not yet done. Not done in the specific way that a take is not done when the singer knows that what the tape holds is an approximation of what the song requires, rather than the thing itself. This is a particular stage in the recording process that most listeners never observe and that even many musicians have difficulty describing accurately from the outside.

The take sounds good. The engineer thinks it sounds good. The producer may think it sounds good, but the singer knows, with a knowledge that is not always articulable and does not always translate into instructions for what to change, that it is not yet what the song needs. Janis had this knowledge highly developed.

Her relationship to the material she chose to record was not casual. She came to a song only when she was ready for it. And her sense of readiness was specific and internal and not always coincident with what a production schedule required. When she had not yet found the right relationship to a song, no number of technically excellent takes would produce what she was looking for.

She would keep trying, not out of stubbornness, but because she could hear the difference between what was on tape and what the song actually was. The late night sessions went on. Take after take. The tape filled with versions that were good, but not right. And she kept going back. Pearl was, by the fall of 1970, the record that Janis Joplin had been working toward, without knowing it.

The previous albums, the Big Brother records, I Got Dem Ol’ Cosmic Blues Again, Mama, had been important in their own ways, had produced important music, had documented the development of a voice and a performer and an artistic sensibility. But they had also been made under various kinds of constraint.

The constraint of a band that was still finding its form. The constraint of a production approach that was not always the right approach for the material. The constraint of a singer who was still working out exactly what her voice was for. Pearl did not feel constrained in any of these ways. The Full Tilt Boogie Band was exactly the right band.

Paul Rothchild was exactly the right producer. He understood that the job was not to shape the performance into something presentable, but to capture it in the state it was already in, which was extraordinary. The sessions had been going well. The songs that were done were better, most people who heard them believed, than anything she’d recorded before.

She was also in the fall of 1970 clearer than she had been in some time. The accounts of people who saw her during the Pearl sessions consistently described someone who was focused and engaged and working with a directness that was different from the more chaotic periods of the preceding years. She was finishing something.

She knew she was finishing something. She wanted it to be right. There was one thing she could not get right. One song. Late at night. Take after take. The takes that exist, the recordings made in those late night sessions of the song that would not make Pearl, are not generally available to the public.

They exist in archives, in the holdings of the people and the estate that manage Janis Joplin’s recorded legacy. They have been heard by some people who work in that context, and those people have described them in various ways over the years, but none of those descriptions constitute a clear account of what the recording contains or what it was working toward.

What is available is the context, the Pearl sessions, the specific quality of those weeks in the fall of 1970. The voice in the state it was in during that period, which was, by the accounts of everyone present, an extraordinary state. She was singing better than she had ever sung. The recordings from those sessions that did make Pearl demonstrate this.

Whatever was in the late-night sessions was made with the same voice in the same room at the same time, and the voice was in the same extraordinary state. The song that was not finished was not left out because it was inferior. It was left out because she could not, before the sessions ended, find the relationship to it that she was looking for.

Whether she would have found it in more time is a question that cannot be answered because there was no more time. The sessions that followed the late-night recordings did not produce a resolution. The tape exists. The song is on it. In the state it was in when the sessions ended, not finished, not released, but there.

Paul Rothchild, who had produced the Doors and who had a particular gift for knowing when to push and when to simply let a recording session be what it was, understood that what was happening in the late-night sessions was not a production problem. It was not a technical problem. It was not a problem at all in the conventional sense.

It was a singer working at the edge of what she could hear trying to get to the place in the song that she could hear but had not yet captured. This is the difference between a recording session and a recording. The session is the attempt. The recording is what happens when the attempt produces the thing.

Good producers know that the most important part of their job is recognizing the difference between the two. Knowing when a take is the thing and when it is still only the attempt even when both are technically proficient. Rothchild had experienced this with Jim Morrison who had a different relationship to the recording process than Janis but who shared the fundamental quality of not being able to produce the performance until the performance was actually there rather than when the schedule said it should be. He had learned to create the conditions under which the performance could arrive rather than trying to manufacture it through repetition or technique. He created those conditions in the late night sessions. He ran the tape. He waited.

He listened to takes that were good but not the thing. He kept the studio running because he understood that she was not done. Not yet. The people who were in the studio during those final weeks of the Pearl sessions have described the experience in terms that are consistent enough to be taken seriously.

A singer at the height of her craft sessions that were producing material that everyone in the room could tell was exceptional. A particular quality of clarity, the specific clinical clarity of someone who has found the center of what they do and is working from that center without distraction. They have also described the late night sessions as different in tone from the main sessions, more private, more focused, less social.

The atmosphere of a singer working alone with a problem that only she can resolve because only she can hear the full distance between what is on tape and what the song requires. Rothchild was there, the engineer was there, but the work was hers. The problem was hers. The resolution, if it came, would be hers.

It did not come. The sessions ended without it. The song remains unfinished in the specific sense of a recording session left open, the takes on tape, the producer’s notes and whatever log was kept. The question of whether the next session would find the resolution or whether the next session would produce more takes that were good but not the thing.

There was no next session. October 4th, 1970. And after that, the sessions that remained became the archive of what had been done rather than the beginning of what had not yet been finished. The song went into the archive unfinished. Still on the tape, still in whatever state the last take left it in, still waiting for something that did not come in time.

Pearl was released in January 1971. It contains 14 tracks. Me and Bobby McGee, Cry Baby, Get It While You Can, Move Over, Trust Me, Half Moon, Buried Alive in the Blues, the instrumental, the track that has no vocal because the vocal was scheduled for October 5th, and on October 4th, Janis Joplin died in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel, and the vocal was never recorded.

The album reached number one. Me and Bobby McGee reached number one as a single. The album was certified triple platinum. It has been in print continuously since its release. Every person who has ever picked up the record and placed the needle in the groove has received exactly what Pearl became, the 14 tracks that exist in the form they are in, constituting one of the most powerful records in American music.

What the album does not contain is the 15th song, the one from the late-night sessions, the one she was working toward and did not reach. Whether its absence changes Pearl in any meaningful way is not a question that can be answered because Pearl as it exists is complete in the way that a thing is complete when it is what it is, when the form it has taken is the form it has, regardless of what its form was intended to be.

But the song is somewhere recorded in the state it was in when the sessions ended. And the question of what she was reaching for in those late-night takes, what the song was trying to become, that question does not go away simply because the sessions did. Pearl is a finished album. The people who made it and the estate that has managed its legacy and the listeners who have lived with it for 50 years all understand it as a finished work.

A complete artistic statement that begins and ends in the right places and contains what it contains and is what it is. The unfinished song from the late night sessions does not unmake Pearl’s completeness. It adds to it something that is present in all great art. The knowledge that the thing we have was not the only thing that existed.

That the work that survived into the world was selected from a larger field of work that was in progress. And that the in progress material exists somewhere in an archive. In a state that is neither the thing the song became nor the thing the song was supposed to become. What the late night sessions tell us about Janis Joplin in October 1970 is not a secret or a mystery.

They tell us what the Pearl sessions tell us. That she was working at the full extent of what she was. That she was demanding of herself what the material demanded. That she could hear the difference between the approximation and the real thing and was not willing to accept the approximation when the real thing had not yet arrived.

The real thing was on its way. In the tape of those late night takes in the voice and the state it was in working towards something she could hear clearly but had not yet reached in a form she could accept. And then the sessions ended. And Pearl became what Pearl became. And the song stayed on the tape.

Unfinished. Still reaching.