One late night Janis Joplin stepped into the Chelsea elevator with a professorial-looking man with a hangdog look—thirty-three-year-old Leonard Cohen. He would later memorialise the tryst that followed in two variations of his “Chelsea Hotel”—#1 and #2—with #2 featuring these lines about their sexual encounter: “You were talking so brave and so sweet / giving me head on the unmade bed / while limousines wait in the street.” Janis’s view of their encounter was less tender. The following year, during a session with acclaimed photographer Richard Avedon, while being interviewed by his assistant/writer Doon Arbus, Janis spoke about the ups and downs of her sex life. “Sometimes… you’re with someone and you’re convinced that they have something… to tell you,” she confided. “Or… you want to be with them. So maybe nothing’s happening, but you keep telling yourself something’s happening. You know, innate communication. He’s just not saying anything. He’s moody or something. So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping.… And then, all of a sudden, about four o’clock in the morning, you realise that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me. I mean, that really happened to me. Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face it happened. Twice. Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen. And it’s strange ’cause they were the only two that I can think of, like prominent people, that I tried to… without really liking them up front, just because I knew who they were and wanted to know them.… And then they both gave me nothing… but I don’t know what that means. Maybe it just means they were on a bummer.” Leonard Cohen, it turned out, observed more than “nothing” about her. In his song’s lyrics and wistful melody, composed in the months after her death, Cohen captured her wit and lifelong, tortured relationship with beauty, writing: “And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty / You fixed yourself, you said, ‘Well, never mind we are ugly but we have the music.’ ”
Janis Joplin At The Chelsea Hotel 1
Photo by David Gahr
Janis Joplin At The Chelsea Hotel II
Photo by David Gahr
Leonard Cohen in the Chelsea Hotel (1974)
George-Warren, Holly. Janis: Her Life and Music
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