One singer changed everything about Janis Joplin’s singing: “You can’t help but feel him”
“I can’t write a song unless I’m really traumatic, emotional, and I’ve gone through a few changes, I’m very down,” Janis Joplin once said. “No matter what you do, you get shot down anyway.”
The Troubadour wasn’t the kindest to its lonelier figures. Most people, when they recall first meeting Joplin, remember how much of a contradiction her life seemed – on stage singing to thousands one moment, a victim to her own demons the next. Leonard Cohen once said she had the typical “pop star life”, and would always go home “deeply lonely”.
A true tortured poet, Joplin didn’t know who she was outside of her own pain. Her words reflected her cynical view that the world was only ever out to get you. Even romance never ended well, and any experience with joy and happiness was only fleeting. As with most troubled stars, it translated into the most beautiful music imaginable, Joplin becoming the ultimate voice of a generation that had ever felt lost and in a constant state of malaise.
The man whom Joplin once said “gave me nothing”, Cohen, wrote his lovelorn lament ‘Chelsea Hotel 2’ about their brief encounter. In the song, he paints Joplin as the devastatingly complex character she was, revealing that their common ground was how they saw developed an immediate connection: “Clenching your fist for the ones like us / Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty / You fixed yourself, you said, ‘Well, never mind / We are ugly but we have the music.’”
While most of us will probably associate Joplin with beauty in every sense of the word, it’s not something she ever felt close to. Perhaps in her music, she was able to feel validated by the beauty in her own poetic tragedy, but physically, she felt as far from it as possible. But Joplin’s ability to transform her own tales of woe into the beautiful art of song didn’t just come from nowhere. As many in the same scene, it came from observing how others did it.
And one figure who stuck with Joplin through her entire career was Otis Redding. Born immersed in the grooves of blues and soul, Joplin learned a lot from Redding, once claiming he was the only singer who helped her to “push” her presence on stage rather than “sliding right over it”. He helped her to develop her style of singing in a different way, seeing performances as an exchange of energy rather than a one-dimensional display of talent.
Maybe this is because, no matter what she did, she always seemed to channel him in some way. Once, while wishing her cherished singer a happy birthday, she said, “You can’t get away from [Otis]; he pounds on you; you can’t help but feel him.” Much of that is what she decided to adopt in her own performances, not just in the scorned rasp of her own voice, but how she carried herself and the sheer goddamn force of emotion she gave on stage.
This ensured that, even as she poured her heart out in front of thousands of people, her loneliness was always a source of unity. For those looking from the outside in, she was exactly how she viewed herself. But for those in her presence, it inspired a platform for the tragedy in all of us, an environment where we’re all the same, even if our troubles look different from person to person.
