Janis in Record Mirror 1969 +

Janis Joplin at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, 1970. Photo by David Gahr.

Joplin was described by Record Mirror in 1969 as “a kind of mixture of Lead Belly, a steam engine, Calamity Jane, Bessie Smith, an oil derrick and rot-gut bourbon, funnelled into the 20th century between El Paso and San Francisco”.

As she told an interviewer: “Man, I’d rather have 10 years of superhypermost than live to be 70 sitting in some goddamn chair watching television.”

And she continued: “People aren’t supposed to be like me, make out like me, drink like me, live like me, but now they’re paying me $50,000 a year for me to be like me.”

“She was portrayed as this loud, Southern Comfort-drinking girl – and she definitely loved to have fun – but like so many women she was trying to find herself,” says Berg, who says that she fell in love with the singer as she learned more about her.

“She enjoyed the high of it, and she enjoyed what happened to her on stage when she was giving the audience everything she had inside, but she had a really hard time with trying to balance the high with the mundane aspects of life and finding the right people to balance it out with.” 

-Edward Helmore

 

Janis at Woodstock with girlfriend Peggy Caserta

Peggy Caserta

Janis and Peggy

The Peggy Caserta story is worth pursuing but the first book 'Going Down With . . . ' is largely not written by Caserta but was issued to fund her then drug habit of some substantial degree, she later went on to try to correct this scurrilous nonsense. Janis was certainly nothing if not bisexual and sought warmth companionship and sexual relationships wherever she found them but Caserta was a confirmed lesbian and couldn't cope with Janis' sexual predilection for men when it arose.