LIFE OF A LEGEND
Phoenicia resident examines life and legacy of Janis Joplin in new book
Holly GeorgeWarren was 12 years old and living in a small town in North Carolina when she first discovered Janis Joplin.
Already hooked on rock-androll thanks to a little AM radio that brought the sounds of New York City radio stations into her bedroom, George-Warren watched Joplin on the Dick Cavett show and mourned when the hard-rocking singer with a passion for the blues, booze, and, unfortunately, drugs, died on Oct. 4, 1970.
A few months after Joplin’s death, George-Warren added to her then-fledgling album collection “Pearl,” Joplin’s final album, which was released posthumously in January 1971.
“I still have my original copy,” she said during a recent inter
view.
Little did George-Warren know back then that her life would become intertwined with Joplin’s or that 48 years later she would be called on to write a biography of the iconic performer who would forever change the way women were regarded in music.
“Janis: Her Life and Music,” was released by Simon & Shuster on Oct. 22.
It offers readers an intimate look into Joplin’s life — from growing up in rural Port Arthur Texas where she first discovered the sounds of the blues that she would come to emulate — to her meteoric rise in the rock and roll world and ultimately
her death from an accidental heroin overdose at the age of 27.
It also reveals how hard Joplin worked to become successful and the artistic control she demanded over her music at a time when few musicians, let alone female musicians, had much — if any say — over the production of their music.
“I was surprised to find out how long and hard she worked to become a musician,” George-Warren said. “She tried to put forth this image of herself, this persona that she just went out on the stage and felt things.”
“She was the product of years and years of struggle and hard work,” GeorgeWarren said.
George-Warren’s said her life was touched from an early age by Joplin and rockand-roll in general.
“It opened up a whole world for me,” she recalled. In the fourth grade, she said, she and some classmates started a little band and it was the music scene that drew her to New York.
“Because of people like Janis Joplin, I wanted to get out of my small town in North Carolina and go to where the action was.”
After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where, incidentally, Joplin performed in 1968), George-Warren headed to New York City, eventually landing a job at Rolling Stone.
In 1999, she was invited to be a panelist at the “Remembering Janis” symposium at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where she met Joplin’s siblings, bandmates and friends. She was back in Cleveland in
2009, where she was a keynote speaker at an event honoring Joplin and in 2013, she was asked to write the liner notes for the two-CD set “The Pearl Sessions.”
It was those encounters, and the encouragement of her literary agent, Sarah Lazin, that spurred the Phoenicia resident to take on the task of writing a biography about one of the biggest female rock-and-roll stars of all time.
Through interviews with Joplin’s siblings, bandmates and friends, and by reading letters Joplin had written and looking through the scrapbooks she kept, George-Warren is able to paint a distinct picture of Joplin.
George-Warren describes Joplin as a teenager in Texas enamored by the blues being performed by black artists like Etta James, Lead Belly, and Big Mama Thornton. She talks about the difficulties she had growing up in Port Arthur and leaving for the 1960s scene in San
Francisco and how, while Joplin portrayed herself as a thrill-seeker, she was still very much connected to her Texas home.
“I guess it was surprising, how even though she became this queen of the counter culture, she never completely cut ties with her background,” George-Warren said. “She was an amazing letter writer and she always stayed in touch with her family.
“I think she was a very multifaceted person,” she said.
George-Warren, a twotime Grammy nominee and author of 16 books, will be at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock on Nov. 3 and at Oblong Books and Music in Rhinebeck on Nov. 13. She will be at the Emerson Resort, in Mount Tremper on Nov. 16.