Janis: Her Life and Musicby Holly George-WarrenSimon & Schuster$28.99 400 pagesBuy the book here.Įnabled by dozens of interviews and access to key archives, including the Joplin family’s, George-Warren achieves the assured voice of a biographer who knows her subject as well as anyone can. Texas-born rock icon Janis Joplin has been one of American culture’s most compelling figures for more than 50 years, in large part because of the intrigue she presents: Just who was this storm of a singer, and just what inside her came out as that voice? In Janis: Her Life and Music, author and music journalist Holly George-Warren makes a definitive exploration of those questions, laying out in impressive detail the particular personal alchemy that led Joplin to forge all-new alloys of power and vulnerability, freedom and fatalism. The brash, flashy stage persona she developed and named Pearl, also the title of her final album, was more than just an act but less than the whole her. (Her engagement at age 22 to a philandering liar, with whom she’d fallen in love while using amphetamines on her first trip to California, ended with his abandonment and her first major heartbreak.) She plays golf with her aunt, adopts a puppy, and asks for a Betty Crocker cookbook for Christmas.
But we also see Joplin sewing a quilt in traditional preparation for marriage.
There are expected scenes among the beatniks, vagabonds, and hippies of Austin and San Francisco. George-Warren makes clear Joplin’s competing desires: the picket-fence life that would have pleased her quite conventional mother versus the seeking, footloose path she first envisioned at age 14 upon reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. As her fame rose, though, the resultant scrutiny inflamed her core insecurities afresh. The book paints a portrait of an outsider whose thirst for acceptance was denied in her hometown of Port Arthur, then briefly satisfied by the 1950s and ’60s musical counterculture that embraced her in Austin and San Francisco.
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