Janis Joplin

The meteor that was Janis Joplin rose, soared, and fell in just three years, from the summer of 1967, when she exploded into the national consciousness with Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Monterey International Pop Festival, to the fall of 1970, when she died in a motel room in Hollywood.

In mid-April, 1968, Janis Joplin, fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company, played the legendary Winterland in San Francisco. It was a perfect moment to catch them. They'd just inked a major recording deal with Columbia Records. They were playing great. They were starting to make some money. And the spotlight was only just turning squarely on them.

Fueled by the trappings of their growing success, they took the Winterland stage with the energy and confidence of a band on the brink of going big. As the staggering performances captured and released here for the first time clearly attest, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company were indeed, on their way.

Janis Joplin wasn't anybody's yellow rose. Better to call her Texas' most enduring thorn. Born, a fifth generation Texan, in the deepwater anchorage town of Port Arthur, Joplin always had one foot on the highway, telling anyone who would listen, "Texas is okay if you want to settle down, but it's not for outrageous people, and I was always outrageous." All this in the era where young women were groomed and coifed within an inch of their life, and made to think that they had to either aspire to be Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy or Eleanor Roosevelt. Janis offered another choice. A harbinger of the burgeoning cultural revolution, she turned her back on the life that was sketched out for her in this small town that was more Louisiana than Texas. After one false start back in 1961, she tucked all her worldly possessions under her arm, and stuck out her thumb, along with the equally atavistic Chet Helms (who would play an important role in her destiny--hooking her up with Big Brother and the Holding Company) making the long fifty hour trip hitchhiking to San Francisco to start her a new life and help usher in a new epoch.

"After a final gig in December [with Big Brother]," writes Ben Fong-Torres, "she would put together one ensemble [Kozmic Blues Band], then another [Full Tilt Boogie Band]. She enjoyed some highs, both personally and professionally, but the end came far too soon." Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970. And although the members of Big Brother have kept the band going to this day with a succession of lead singers, "it is inevitable," Fong-Torres concludes, "that people are thinking about the singer who isn't there."