Leonard Cohen’s favourite Janis Joplin song
The Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen shadowed Bob Dylan’s migration to New York City in the late 1960s. Having published a few poetry anthologies, Cohen sought a more lucrative medium to exercise his passion and talent for word arrangement. After sniffing out the Big Apple’s more arty quarters, Cohen set up in the famous Chelsea Hotel to optimise chances of meeting esteemed peers.
Within days, Cohen found himself rubbing shoulders with members of Andy Warhol’s creative troupe at The Factory, including The Velvet Underground and their early collaborator Nico. While bunking at the Chelsea Hotel, previously home to Mark Twain, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and Jackson Pollock, Cohen also bumped into rock singer Janis Joplin.
The pair first met in a lift doorway in the hotel’s main lobby. “I said to her, ‘Are you looking for someone?’” Cohen recalled in 1988. “She said, ‘Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.’ I said, ‘Little lady, you’re in luck; I am Kris Kristofferson.’ Those were generous times. Even though she knew that I was someone shorter than Kris Kristofferson, she never let on. Great generosity prevailed in those doom decades.”
After engaging in friendly conversation, the pair sauntered back to Cohen’s room, and there started their short romance with each other. This one-night romance had an effect that has echoed through the years in Cohen’s beautiful song ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2’, which, while he wouldn’t admit it until years had passed, was written for her and the electrifying evening they shared each other’s company.
“[It was] Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face; it happened twice,” Joplin once said of the brief but memorable romance. “Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen. And it’s strange ’cause they were the only two that I can think of, like prominent people, that I tried to…without really liking them up front, just because I knew who they were and wanted to know them. And then they both gave me nothing.”
Sadly, Cohen and Joplin would only meet a couple more times as friends before her untimely death in 1970. Cohen went on to record ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2’ in 1974 and never forgot his brief friendship with Joplin.
For part of Leonard Cohen: In His Own Words, Cohen’s 1998 collaborative biography with Jim Devlin, Cohen provided a list of his all-time favourite songs. Alongside selections by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Edith Piaf, Tom Waits and more, Cohe saved a spot for Joplin, picking out her enduring cover of ‘Piece of My Heart’.
The song was originally written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns and first recorded by Erma Franklin in 1967. A year later, Joplin released her version of the track featuring Big Brother and the Holding Company as the backing band. This version popularised the song and remains Joplin’s biggest hit.
Listen to Janis Joplin’s ‘Piece of My Heart’ below.
