Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin belongs among rock's great burned-out lives. But never more than in her case can we speak of an almost total fusion between life and music. Janis Joplin is little more than her voice and her despair. Backed by various outfits (Big Brother & The Holding Company, the Kozmic Blues Band and finally the Full-Tilt Boogie Band) over the course of her (brief) career, she used blues-rock as the most accessible, immediate — and most fitting — means to vent her frustrations, her sense of being misunderstood, and her dissatisfaction, giving rise to blazing, howling performances in which her voice bends, softens, screams, turns tender, always seems on the verge of dying yet keeps crying out, anguished, melodramatic, self-indulgent. It's the voice of someone who feels alone, of someone who ended up in that body by mistake.

She died on October 3, 1970, at 27, of an overdose, after achieving consecration first at the Monterey festival in 1967 and then at Woodstock in 1969. Posthumously, just a few months after her death, came "Pearl", the album she had been working on with the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, the most representative work and the high point of the Texan artist's output. It opens with "Move Over", one of the few tracks written by Joplin herself. It's acid, raw, pounding blues-rock. The band is very much in evidence (and in great form), drums marking the pace, guitar carrying the melody, Joplin's voice cracking on every line, then piano, bass and blazing organ launch her higher and higher, until it all blurs into ever more broken sound. It's the perfect example of how even a fairly well-crafted, conventional song is transfigured (and ennobled) by Joplin's interpretation.

"Cry Baby" is the most famous song in her catalogue, and it's also the best: a gospel number in which all the bewilderment and rage are literally spat out. The crescendos of piano and drums serve as a prelude and accompany the screams of a singer who attacks the world (and the audience in front of her, who embody it), without ever having the strength to defeat it. "Cry Baby" is a ritual, a catharsis: it's the body taking possession of itself and screaming until it destroys itself, until nothing remains but silence echoing through an empty space.

In "A Woman Left Lonely", carried by the keyboards (piano and organ), with the band simply providing accompaniment, one can detect a source of inspiration for the songs on Carole King's "Tapestry" (which would come out shortly after): but once again what makes the difference (this time more a matter of tone than quality, given how high the King album's level is too) is the voice that screams, tears itself apart, despairs: the songs on "Pearl" are journeys in search of redemption. With "Half-Moon" the most classic blues-rock returns, with percussion in the Santana mold as travelling companions. The track boasts one of the most inspired choruses (again driven by the piano) of Joplin's career. The ending, meanwhile, with its ebb and flow of music and voice, adds further value to an already valuable piece.

"Buried Alive in the Blues" is an acid instrumental, with flashes of guitar and organ, well-crafted and fast-paced: yet paradoxically it's precisely when the instruments become the sole protagonists (as in the band's various solos) that things grow less interesting. A heavenly cascade of piano and organ notes with guitar counterpoint opens "My Baby", which a melody — certainly no less impressive — carries into an immortal gospel chorus, with the raw, husky, even more anguished frontwoman lending the whole thing moments of pure religiosity. Through the reworking of "Me and Bobby McGee", which gains considerably in fatalism, that road toward redemption continues until it reaches a pivotal stop, namely "Mercedes Benz". A prayer for solo voice with hands keeping time, lasting barely two minutes. Joplin calls on everyone to sing along with her ("everybody"), but the only voice that rings out is her own. Practically a testament. A better sequel to the ethereal "Trust Me" (again it's the piano that shapes the effect) could not have been conceived. It's the most open song on the record, and with it Joplin, rather than screaming at (against) the world, gives herself over, tender.

"Get It While You Can" closes everything out, epic, with the voice finding within itself its own relaunch, its own strength, while the tightly-knit band pushes her forward, lifts her up (you can also hear an increasingly piercing, Verlaine-like guitar, about a minute or a minute and a half before the grand finale) and carries her into the sky. Where, more than thirty years on, she still resides.

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31/10/2006