Suddenly, I Get Janis Joplin

About a month ago, I went to an outdoor screening of the Festival Express, a documentary about a promoter who hired a train and a bunch of musicians and sent a rock concert rolling across Canada in 1970.

The Grateful Dead was on board, and the Band, and Janis Joplin.

In 1970 — the year of the Festival Express, the year Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose — I was 14. My tastes in music ran towards strummers. Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel.

Janis Joplin I didn’t get. Why did anybody want to listen to someone who just screamed?

Suddenly, 45 years later, it was like a piece of math falling into place. Ohhh. That was the blues Janis Joplin was singing. That’s why she was screaming. And she was pure passion.

I was a little slow on the uptake. Forty-five years slow, I’d say.

In my defense I will say this: I was young. Too young for Woodstock. And they — the people old enough to go to Woodstock — were a little scary.

My father and I marched against the war. I started an underground newspaper in high school. I wore peace buttons and tattered jeans and argued with teachers. But I was a virgin and hadn’t even smoked pot yet. I didn’t have a single good vomit story.

More than anything, it was a matter of age. It was all there — the sex and drugs and rock and roll — in the future. I was too young.

Not so for my cousin Anne, who lived in Baltimore. She was just the right age. She adored Janis Joplin. Drank Southern Comfort just to be like her, affected the same kind of cigarette holder. She even went to the same kind of clubs.

And so it was that one night, Anne showed up to Max’s Kansas City in New York City, and Janis Joplin was there, drunk out of her mind.

They were both wearing the same shawl. It was supposed to be one-of-a-kind. Something to do with Woodstock.

“She came up to me,” Anne says. “And said, ‘Where did you get that?’”

Janis shoved Anne.

Punches were thrown. And Janis Joplin was thrown out.

I wish I had a story like that. I don’t. I’m not nearly that cool. I wasn’t even cool enough to listen to Janis Joplin records safely from the suburbs.

Back in the day, a homely girl from Port Arthur, Texas sang her heart out, and the cool kids got it. She wasn’t always cool herself. She shouldn’t have shoved Anne, and she shouldn’t have shot heroin. But she had something that none of the balladeers I listened to ever came close to.

Now I get it.