Janis Joplin
>Rock of Ages
>
 |
| Stephen Alcorn |
Wendy Smith remembers two rock legends forty years after their deaths @ American Scholar.
I was 14 when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died within 16 days of each other. It was 40 years ago, the fall of 1970, hardly more than three years since the Monterey Pop Festival had made them both stars, but as far as my friends and I were concerned, they’d always been around. They were part of our musical landscape, along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. Drugs, I regret to say, were part of our landscape too; we bought into the counterculture’s glorification of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll as the way to blast our generation loose from the dead hand of conformity and the dreaded prospect of turning into our parents. We shrugged off adult finger wagging over the deaths of two 27-year-olds from heroin overdose and suffocation due to barbiturate intoxication (though Hendrix choking on his own vomit inspired a fair amount of gross-out teen humor). When you’re 14, 27 seems far away, and premature death can seem romantically tragic rather than criminally wasteful.
I accepted that Joplin and Hendrix, both famous for their pursuit of excess as a path to ecstasy, had paid the price for their rejection of conventional wisdom, conventional behavior, and conventional restraint. They were the first members of the pantheon I formed in high school of heroes who had lived hard and died young: Lenny Bruce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Garfield, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith. Joplin introduced me to Bessie Smith, whom she always cited as her greatest inspiration, though I didn’t start listening to the 1920s’ Empress of the Blues until after Janis died. At 14, to my mother’s horror, Joplin was my model of what a woman could be: a plain, unpopular teenage girl who transformed herself into a flamboyant counterculture diva through sheer talent and audacity.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
altimoniere 
