Standing Nude: The naked image of Janis Joplin that defined her legacy
Janis Joplin is the poster girl for the very notion of a free-spirited existence. If there was such a thing as a Pictionary, her image would sit as the definition under bohemian. She is as synonymous with the 1960s ideals of peace, love and liberation as modern bank adverts and bad urban poetry. She used this energy to trailblaze a sense of spiritualism that kickstarted the Summer of Love and all the reverberations tied to that revolution.
Her view in life was “the more you live, the less you die” and in this sense, although she passed away tragically young at 27, she is at least a paradigm of the notion that the light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. She firmly believed that you should “not compromise yourself” because “you are all you have got” and that message meant that she would rather court controversy than curb her extricating edge.
Two instances spring to mind on this front. The first being when she was arrested for swearing at a concert in 1969. While a retrospective view of the ‘60s paints the era in the kaleidoscopic glow of a spiritual orgy perfuse with peace, love and liberation, briefly permeated by horrific events and governments at odds with the times, the truth is that it was as divided a decade as any. This division came to the fore when liberal LA-based Joplin found herself at loggerheads with conservatives in Tampa, Florida.
In March 1969, Jim Morrison was arrested while in The Sunshine State for allegedly exposing his Johnson while onstage. Morrison fervently denied the penal charge claiming the bulbous cylinder on display was merely a beige microphone. However, the incident left a scar on the previously pristine memory of Tampa locals, whose backs were up when the free-loving Joplin came to town the following November. This beach community was no place for deadbeats.
In what now seems like some fictional parody of the times, midway through her performance, the lights went up in an attempt to quell the excitement of the crowd. Reports from the time do not indicate any specific incident that sparked the mid-show halting of the performance other than a simmering excitement that the authorities worried would spill over and develop into a full-blown ‘good time’.
Fearing a knees-up en masse, and the chaotic smiling hysteria that comes with it, the brave officers present did all they could to restore banal order. They clambered onto the stage and kindly asked the famed rock ‘n’ roll insouciant performer whether she would perhaps reverse her intent and try to assist them in subduing the happy crowd into a more manageable state of ennui. In short, her response was ‘off you fuck, fellas’.
After a flurry of obscenities, it would seem that the officers accepted a deferral of legal order and departed the stage to the relative safety of the crowd, away from the caustic ridiculing of the foul-mouthed Joplin and her untameable bravura. Unlike Jim Morrison, whose alleged spam javelin-exposing antics called the show to an instant halt, Joplin was allowed to continue and put the powers of her voice to use in a different way before she exited the stage and was ushered away from her dressing room, briefly thrown behind by bars.
What do we learn from this story? Well, that Joplin was unafraid to brave risk in order to face what she deemed as civil liberty. And Bob Seidemann’s tale of photographing the hippie icon is yet another golden example of her baring it all. In 1967, he went to snap the rising rocker and the results of that shoot became a staple of how she would be remembered upon her death five years later.
Seidemann suggested that in order to capture her wild ways that she might take a topless turn for the picture. She enjoyed this suggestion so much that she insisted on going the full monty—half measures for Joplin were purely restricted to shoe sizes. Full nudity was now fixed in her mind and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “That’s the way she was,” Seidemann recalled, “she wanted to take her clothes off real bad.”
When she passed away, this raunchy picture was the one that was circulated along with her obituary and that says an awful lot about Joplin herself. The image itself tells an even more graphic tale: yes, I am vulnerable, and, no, I don’t really care—after all, it’s only natural. This was rebellion but it was not without a cause and Joplin was always willing to pay whatever penalty would befall her in order to bring liberation to fruition.
