Southern Discomfort
After seeing The Road to Psychedelia at the Black Angels gig, I felt compelled to dig into Janis Joplin a bit more. So I ripped my wife’s 3-CD boxed set Janis onto my iPod, and dusted off my copy of Myra Friedman’s book Buried Alive. I’d bought the book almost ten years ago during a spending spree at Tower Books (which also netted me Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, and U2: The Unforgettable Fire, both of which also remain unread) so it was probably a little overdue.
Friedman worked for Janis’s record company (Columbia Records) as Janis’s publicity agent. She spent a lot of time with Janis throughout her brief but meteoric rise and, since Janis’s death, met with a lot of Janis’s former friends and family. She’s no longer employed by the record company, and seems largely unconcerned with personal aggrandizement or making money from the book. You can therefore probably consider the story to be fairly accurate. Sadly, it’s not a particularly pretty one. Sure, the book is well written and engaging, but the life it documents sometimes makes it an uncomfortable read.
Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. She was fat and extremely spotty, and as a result extremely unpopular at school. The accounts of the bullying and abuse she received at the hands of her school ‘mates’ are truly sad, but perhaps put some important context to her absolute desire to success, and her inferiority complex that continued despite the success she did achieve.
Right from the early days of her career (once she realized she could actually make a career out of singing, rather than just joining her male friends in drunken singalongs) Joplin sought reassurance of her talent and her looks. “Do you think I’m pretty?” seems to have been her daily question to anyone who would listen. And oddly, the more her success grew, and the more men she bedded (almost entirely as a result of this success), the more her insecurity grew, and the more she craved reassurance. To the point where you could just slap her. Really. She brokers no pity.
Of course, at the end of the day, it was the drugs that done for her. Sadly, by the end of the book, one can’t really feel any sympathy for her, for suffering this particular demise. It wasn’t particularly a ‘tragic accident’ or another case of a vast talent snuffed out too soon when there was so much unfulfilled potential. Rather, she was an idiot who didn’t know (or at least didn’t acknowledge) her own limitations, wanting “more of everything now”. She refused to help herself, and refused the help of those around her (including Friedman) when it was offered. Sad, but stupid.
What we are left with is the music. Having listened to just about everything she released, there are indeed some great songs. Me and Bobby McGee, Ball and Chain, Cry Baby, Try (Just A Little Bit Harder), Piece of My Heart are all classic tracks that stand up to repeated listening. But there’s also a lot of rubbish where she was either just finding her style, or was too shot through with Southern Comfort and/or heroin to carry a tune. Consequently, I’ve deleted all but the aforementioned highlights from my iPod, but I don’t listen to even those very often any more: it’s just too painful thinking of the sad, bag of neuroses behind the strong, powerful persona she projected in her singing.
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