Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren

Biography

The first time I remember hearing her voice, I was about age nine and didn’t get it.

My mom loves a good radio sing-along in the kitchen, preferably with a spatula-microphone in hand and socks on her feet for sliding across the floor Risky-Business style. Mostly, she listens to rock-and-roll bands of various subgenres spanning the late 70s to the early 90s, and I grew up with a deep and durable love for the artists and groups of my childhood.

Bands like Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Foreigner, AC/DC, Cheap Trick, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Great White, Eddie Money, Scorpions, Aldo Nova, and .38 Special frequently find their ways onto my playlists even today.

I can name “Love is a Battlefield,” “Eye of the Tiger,” and “The Warrior” from the first note. I’ve belted out Journey and Boston until hoarse, I’m a first-round pick when it comes to 80s hair-band song identification games (just ask some of my old bar regulars. I mean, how TF do you confuse Ratt with Cinderella? But I digress . . .), and and my partner and I once led a bar full of drunk patrons through “Hold On” by Wilson-Phillips. Because why the fuck not?

It was with rock in my bones that I was born, a trait I passed along to my daughter years later (a story for another time), and in my parents’ kitchen, I developed a reverence for tunes and a healthy respect for the folks who create them. I knew my partner would be a musician or a musically inclined creative thinker long before I found him. I simply cannot exist without rockin’ tunes; they are me.

So when my mother put on “Cry Baby” for me all those years ago, I was stunned.

Sure, the song rocked, kind of, but it was different, twangier than the tunes I was used to. I didn’t understand Janis’s signature scratch or the way she moved her vocals all around the scale like some sort of chaos singer. In fact, my appreciation for Janis didn’t really begin until I became a bartender and met a co-worker who was all-in on Janis. Her enthusiasm for Janis Joplin’s music is what allowed me to listen more deeply, to feel the emotion Janis pulled into her vocal chords each time she hit a stage, to crank up Piece Of My Heart while cruising along the highway from here to there.

While I’m never going to front a rock band, I am a creatively minded person who appreciates lyrics more than most poetry, and after reading Holly George-Warren’s biography, I have an even deeper appreciation for Janis’s messages because I have a better understanding of the person she was, the dreams she had, the process she took to achieve them, and the consequences of her achievements, including figurative isolation and literal death.

Janis followed a dream, one she didn’t even realize was her dream until confronted with her own talent. But once she saw the power she could hold in her voice, she never looked back. She knew she could change the world, and so she put all of herself into her music and left stages physically and emotionally spent.

Here is my favorite quote from Janis: Her Life and Music, along with the bullshit that ran through my brain when I read it the first time and while writing about it today.

---

“Fun isn’t what I want these days. Strange, I never thought I’d ever say that. I’m one of those old-fashioned thrill-crazy kids, you know, or at least I was. I never could see any value or anything to be sought after in anything except fun—and now dig me—I’ve got better things to do than Fun.”

Important reminder that Janis was dead before her 28th birthday, and at the time of her death, her pre-frontal cortex was still fairly newly matured. If you’re not familiar with human brain development, the pre-frontal cortex is responsible for a host of things that make each of us who we are, including (list from Very Well Health):

• Controlling your behavior and impulses 

• Delaying instant gratification 

• Regulating your emotions 

• Planning

• Making decisions 

• Solving problems 

• Making long-term goals 

• Balancing short-term rewards with future goals 

• Changing your behavior when situations change 

• Seeing and predicting the consequences of your behavior 

• Being able to consider many streams of information 

• Being able to focus your attention 

And the pre-frontal cortex also affects our personalities since the pre-frontal cortex is the rational part of the brain and doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. (This is a huge reason why I support raising the age of majority and consent to age 25, but again, that’s a story for another day.)

My sights switched from fun to purpose right around age 26 just after I got married and just before I realized what a horrid mistake I’d made getting married (also a story for another day).

It takes an adult-sized pre-frontal cortex to understand what fun can come when we pursue something important for the long term. Children and young adults simply do not have the functional capacity for long-term planning or for understanding long-term consequences of their actions. They also don’t have the capacity to functionally realize those long-term gains and are ruled by dopaminergic input and stimuli, which can be easily wrecked without the right support systems in place.

This quote from Janis that fun, even for a thrill-crazy kid, necessarily takes a backseat to professional pursuits before her career really took off was surprising, given her age, but it became less so over the next couple hundred pages wherein I saw how her focus unfolded as she matured into the singer she was by the end.

Janis gave her life to music; she entered a relationship with it such that it became the only constant force in her life. There was no other person in her space who could match the support and inspiration music gave her. Trying to build relationships as strong as the one she had with music was part of what led to her death on a spiritual level.

I believe she was able to focus on music unabashedly and set off on a path of self-destruction unawares because of her age when she came into the creative industry.

There are lots of creative folks who put themselves into their work fully, even to their detriments, especially during periods of profound creation. If you’ve read The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, you see this in Marianne Engel and her sculpture. And though the book is a work of fiction, it’s no less powerful in explaining the downside of creativity, unrestrained.

After my divorce, I, too, experienced a period of unrestrained creativity in building the next phase of my life, which quickly led to my drinking copious amounts of alcohol nightly, thanks to a shithole of an apartment located above a smoke shop and next to not one but two hole-in-the-wall bars, one of which became the setting for that “Hold On” singalong mentioned earlier.

There’s something close to mania that occurs in pursuit of creation, something Davidson taps into and something Janis acknowledged at several points in her career. The music took her, carried her with it, wove her into the wind like a ringing chord.

And her chord persists, timeless and incandescent as her style, 54 years after her death.

---

While there were a few statements within the biography that were clear speculation positioned as fact, the speculation was likely close enough to the truth that they were easily overlooked or otherwise brushed off as creative freedom, something I appreciate as a reader. Otherwise, the book brought to life moments lost to history and band politics, like missed live performances, moments I craved for understanding.

And understanding is necessary for me to get to appreciation.

Rather recently, someone pointed out to me that reading is a form of procrastination for me. Dubbed procrasti-learning, I’ve filled my writing time with book reading, and while you won’t yank my claws off my precious books, I also recognize the poignancy of that message.

I was procrasti-learning, thanks very much.

Now, I’m pragmati-learning.

Janis was my first reading selection in books meant to double as research for my novel in progress, one that includes the pursuit of the American Dream, a band on a westward journey, and a whole lotta hope for something better.

If you find yourself vibin’ to Janis while cruising along the highway, read this book.

If you’re curious about how creativity can lead to a kind of madness, read this book.

If you heard stories about the 27 club and wonder how that happens, read this book.

Read the story of a beloved and timeless voice that rose to frenetic levels among the political chaos splitting the creative and ideological communities in the late 60s.

Tap into a time that was to understand the time that is.

And if you’ve read this book, have a love for Janis, or otherwise have thoughts on the quote I selected, share in the comments.

Your book pal,

Fal ♥