JANIS JOPLIN, YOU ARE STILL A 'PIECE OF OUR HEARTS'

Janis Joplin

Today, The Grandma has been at home preparing new English language projects for the closer future. She likes working in new experiences because she believes that a person must learn new things constantly.

Meanwhile she has been searching information and choosing new material, The Grandma has decided to listen to some music.

She loves music and it is a great partner when you are doing whatever you want. The Grandma has chosen Janis Joplin, a great artist that died on a day like today in 1970. She was only 27 years old. Joplin died too young although her legend is still alive.

Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943-October 4, 1970) was an American rock, soul, and blues singer-songwriter, and one of the most successful and widely known rock stars of her era. After releasing three albums, she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. A fourth album, Pearl, was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death. It reached number one on the Billboard charts.

In 1967, Joplin rose to fame following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

More information: BBC

After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band.

She appeared at the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin reached the Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song Me and Bobby McGee, which reached number 1 in March 1971.

Janis Joplin

Her most popular songs include her cover versions of Piece of My Heart, Cry Baby, Down on Me, Ball and Chain, and Summertime; and her original song Mercedes Benz, her final recording.

Joplin, a mezzo-soprano highly respected for her charismatic performing ability, was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Audiences and critics alike referred to her stage presence as electric. Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 15.5 million albums sold.

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on January 19, 1943, to Dorothy Bonita East (1913-1998), a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910-1987), an engineer at Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. The family belonged to the Churches of Christ denomination.

Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school. Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin (UT), though she did not complete her college studies.

More information: DW

In 1963, Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the two years that followed, her drug use increased and she acquired a reputation as a speed freak and occasional heroin user. She also used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort.

Back in Port Arthur in the spring of 1965, after Joplin's parents noticed her weight of 40 kg, she changed her lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. During her time at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar.

Janis Joplin

In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury.

She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who had known her in Texas and who at the time was managing Big Brother. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.

One of Joplin's earliest major performances in 1967 was at the Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical event held on January 29 at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple. Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple.

The band's debut studio album, Big Brother & the Holding Company, was released by Mainstream Records in August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. Two tracks, Coo Coo and The Last Time, were released separately as singles, while the tracks from the previous single, Blindman and All Is Loneliness, were added to the remaining eight tracks.

When Columbia Records took over the band's contract and re-released the album, they included Coo Coo and The Last Time, and put featuring Janis Joplin on the cover. The debut album spawned four minor hits with the singles Down on Me, a traditional song arranged by Joplin, Bye Bye Baby, Call On Me and Coo Coo, on all of which Joplin sang lead vocals.

More information: Rolling Stone I & II

On April 7, 1968, the last day of their East Coast tour, Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the Wake for Martin Luther King, Jr. concert in New York.

For her first major studio recording, Joplin played a major role in the arrangement and production of the songs that would comprise Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, Cheap Thrills. During the recording sessions, produced by John Simon, Joplin was said to be the first person to enter the studio and the last person to leave. Footage of Joplin and the band in the studio shows Joplin in great form and taking charge during the recording for Summertime. The album featured a cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb.

Although Cheap Thrills sounded as if it consisted of concert recordings, like on Combination of the Two and I Need a Man to Love, only Ball and Chain was actually recorded in front of a paying audience; the rest of the tracks were studio recordings. The album had a raw quality, including the sound of a drinking glass breaking and the broken shards being swept away during the song Turtle Blues. Cheap Thrills produced very popular hits with Piece of My Heart and Summertime.

Janis Joplin

Joplin appeared at Woodstock starting at approximately 2:00 a.m., on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig. On Saturday afternoon, when she and the band were flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother from a nearby motel to the festival site and Joplin saw the enormous crowd, she instantly became extremely nervous and giddy. Upon landing and getting off the helicopter, Joplin was approached by reporters asking her questions.

In February 1970, Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites, who had designed the singer's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969.

During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with the Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was enough usable material to compile an LP.

The posthumous Pearl (1971) became the biggest-selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's Me and Bobby McGee.

The last recording Joplin completed was on October 1, 1970 -Mercedes Benz. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song Buried Alive in the Blues, which the band had recorded one week earlier.

More information: Bethel Woods Center

On Sunday afternoon, October 4, 1970, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned when Joplin failed to show up at Sunset Sound Recorders for a recording session in which she was scheduled to provide the vocal track for the instrumental track of the song Buried Alive in the Blues.

In the evening, Full Tilt Boogie's road manager, John Cooke, drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood where Joplin was staying. He saw Joplin's psychedelically painted Porsche 356 C Cabriolet in the parking lot and upon entering Joplin's room (#105), he found her dead on the floor beside her bed. The official cause of death was a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol. Cooke believes Joplin had been given heroin that was much more potent than normal, as several of her dealer's other customers also overdosed that week. Her death was ruled as accidental.

Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, California, and her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean.

Joplin's death in October, 4 1970 at age 27 stunned her fans and shocked the music world, especially when coupled with the death just 16 days earlier of another rock icon, Jimi Hendrix, also at age 27.

More information: The Telegraph

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was,

like other chicks want to be stewardesses.

I read. I painted. I thought.

Janis Joplin