Becoming Janis

As fame gripped Janis Joplin, so too did her self-destructive hedonism – but letters sent home to Texas uncover a very different woman, craving security, stability and love. Mick Brown talks to her family to reveal the inner life of a complex heroine. Ph

A new documentary gives fresh insight into the inner world of Janis Joplin, supported by a cache of never-seen-before letters to her family. By Mick Brown

When Janis Joplin toured America in 1970, just a few months before her death at the age of 27, a Rolling

Stone reporter who was travelling with her took note of the contents of her handbag. Inside were: two movie-ticket stubs, a packet of cigarettes, an antique cigarette holder, several motel- and hotel-room keys, a box of Kleenex, various make-up cases, guitar picks, a bottle of Southern Comfort (empty), a hip fask, cassettes of Otis Redding and Johnny Cash, aspirin, a corkscrew, an alarm clock, a copy of Time magazine, and two hefty books – Thomas Wolfe’s

Look Homeward, Angel and Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The way the things we carr y measure our lives… The accoutrements of the performer as gypsy; her vanities and foibles; her taste for music, and for alcohol; and – not so predictable perhaps – her passion for literature. Joplin had fallen in love with the works of F Scott Fitzgerald as a young girl, and was deeply enamoured with the story of Scott and Zelda – as she put it, ‘that all-out, full-tilt, hell-bent way of living’.

We think we know about Janis Joplin – the rock singer who went full throttle in her performances and her life; the misunderstood girl who escaped the stifing conservatism of small-town America to fnd freedom in the hippy milieu of San Francisco, a walking morality tale of 1960s hedonism and a card-carrying member of the so-called 27 Club, along with Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and AmyWinehouse, all of whom died, tragically, at that age. But as a new documentary shows, Joplin’s life was more complicated than that.

Janis: Little Girl Blue is the frst documentary about the singer to have access to the Joplin family’s correspondence. It draws on letters charting the course of her life, from her troubled childhood in Texas to international fame, along with archive footage and interviews with friends and family, to present a deeply afecting portrait.

‘I’d rather have 10 years of superhyper-most than lIve to be 70 by sIttIng In some goddam chaIr watchIng tv’