She was the epitome of Summer of Love chic – and became overshadowed by tragedy. But as her raw power is celebrated on stage in London, her family and bandmates explain there was far more to the singer than her legend
‘Janis Joplin is important to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, and it’s not my job to tell them that they’re wrong.” It’s 8am in Tucson, Arizona, and the late singer’s brother Michael is being diplomatic as he considers the legacy of an era-defining woman who so many people feel they know. But he has a job to do nonetheless: “When she passed, I had an obligation to protect her history,” he says, against a backdrop of gleaming gold and silver records.
Michael was only 17 when Joplin was found dead of a heroin overdose, aged 27, on the floor of a hotel room in Los Angeles. Fifty-four years later, journalists such as I are still knocking on his door, searching for new insight into the life of a singer whom the talkshow host Dick Cavett once introduced as “a combination of Leadbelly, a steam engine, Calamity Jane and Bessie Smith”.
The tale of the wide-eyed Texan who ran away to the beatnik hills of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood – and became a poster woman for the Summer of Love as a result – remains popular: a musical dramatising Joplin’s life, A Night With Janis Joplin, opened on Broadway in 2011 and arrives in London in August. “Janis is like a Shakespearean story in a lot of ways,” Michael says. “It’s a perfect scenario of redemption and loss.”
She was the epitome of Summer of Love chic – and became overshadowed by tragedy. But as her raw power is celebrated on stage in London, her family and bandmates explain there was far more to the singer than her legend
‘Janis Joplin is important to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, and it’s not my job to tell them that they’re wrong.” It’s 8am in Tucson, Arizona, and the late singer’s brother Michael is being diplomatic as he considers the legacy of an era-defining woman who so many people feel they know. But he has a job to do nonetheless: “When she passed, I had an obligation to protect her history,” he says, against a backdrop of gleaming gold and silver records.
Michael was only 17 when Joplin was found dead of a heroin overdose, aged 27, on the floor of a hotel room in Los Angeles. Fifty-four years later, journalists such as I are still knocking on his door, searching for new insight into the life of a singer whom the talkshow host Dick Cavett once introduced as “a combination of Leadbelly, a steam engine, Calamity Jane and Bessie Smith”.
The tale of the wide-eyed Texan who ran away to the beatnik hills of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood – and became a poster woman for the Summer of Love as a result – remains popular: a musical dramatising Joplin’s life, A Night With Janis Joplin, opened on Broadway in 2011 and arrives in London in August. “Janis is like a Shakespearean story in a lot of ways,” Michael says. “It’s a perfect scenario of redemption and loss.”
Johnson’s “rock and blues opera”, as he calls it, features Joplin songs alongside ones by her influences: Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Odetta, Nina Simone and Bessie Smith. It’s also guided by Michael and his sister Laura and centres on her family dynamic, which Johnson hails as “as authentic as you could possibly get”. Cleaning day in the Joplin household was always set to music, he tells me – and it’s intimate scenes such as this that inform the production’s story. Joplin’s mother, Dorothy, “loved to play show tunes, so they would clean to West Side Story and play all the parts”.
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