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Joplin made the hairs on the back of people’s necks prickle. She began playing coffee houses and hootenannies in Austin and elsewhere, and floored listeners; she had the force of an opera singer. She did a version of “St. James Infirmary” that unnerved people.
Joplin had an itch for emancipation. She began shuttling between Texas and the West Coast, sometimes hitchhiking. She became a well-known performer at Threadgill’s, the Austin restaurant and music venue, before she moved out to the West Coast for good.
Her big personality had a dark side: depression, anxiety, mood swings. She had a capacity for excess, and a nimbus of exhausted hedonism trailed along with her. She smoked, she drank people under the table and she slowly but enthusiastically turned to drugs. She was a meth addict by the time she was 22. “Hey, man, what is it? I’ll try it,” she said. “How do you do it? Do you suck it? No? Do you swallow it? I’ll swallow it.”
The rest of Joplin’s story is better known. She joined the Bay Area band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and became an international star after the band’s 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Some felt that the members of Big Brother weren’t on her level as musicians; she eventually went solo.
George-Warren must have needed a special database to keep up with Joplin’s lovers. “Honey, get it while you can,” she sang. She took her own advice. She was an omnidirectional sexual omnivore.
Joplin took in men and women the way most people take in the morning newspaper. She slept with sailors, musicians, fans and members of the Hells Angels. She turned tricks when stranded and needing money. She joked that one partner “made love in iambic pentameter.” She drove into Mexico for an abortion.
She had relationships with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan of the Grateful Dead and with Country Joe McDonald. Leonard Cohen wrote “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” about her. She had dalliances with Peter Coyote and Kris Kristofferson, whose “Me and Bobby McGee” she covered. She slept with Joe Namath, of all people, and possibly, George-Warren suggests, with Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Dick Cavett. One of Bruce Springsteen’s early bands opened for Joplin in New Jersey. “Help, she’s after me!” Springsteen told his guitarist Steven Van Zandt.
