ABOUT ME
When Janis died I had never heard of her.
I was a little kid and I didn't know anything about rock, blues or r&b. We had a Beatles songbook and my Dad owned copies of Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour, but for the most part we had classical music. There was also folk and folk-revival music in the house, and plenty of European pop like Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and that ubiquitous Peter Sarstedt hit "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)."
We had our Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Judy Collins, Neil Diamond and Ed Ames. My mother sometimes listened to Top 40 radio so I heard a little Elton John and Rolling Stones, but it was always the softer, melodic songs like "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby" and "Ruby Tuesday" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" that stuck in my head. If I heard any Janis Joplin during the time she was alive, I sure didn't remember it.
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Jon Sobel in New Year's Eve shirt
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In junior high (for you youngsters, that was a primitive form of middle school) I was further distracted from rock by my encounter with jazz, mostly the bombastic style a la Maynard Ferguson which my jazzin' friends liked. I also listened many times to a Pierre Gossez album of jazz-Bach fusion. So even with jazz it was the melodic or "chamber" styles that made sense and stuck with me.
A friend gave me Boston's first album when it came out, but I hated it and put it away as if it were an alien artifact. Of course a lot of people now would say I merely had natural good taste. I will give Boston their due, they made some great pop-rock with real melodies, but at the time I found the orchestrations overblown and the vocals chilly and unmanly.
Around tenth grade I hooked up with new friends who listened to rock, and I soon formed definite tastes, favoring arty stuff like Kansas, Yes, Genesis and most of all Jethro Tull over (what seemed to me at the time) more chaotic bands like The Who or The Doors. I did like the Stones (melodies again!) though I wondered why the recordings sounded so messy. But this was all boy music. If I ever heard Janis before age 18, I don't recall it. My friends never mentioned her, and I never heard her until the early 80s when I turned 18 and could go to bars where girls played Janis on the jukebox and the only other female rocker was Joan Jett, whom we boys seemed to like even more more than the girls did. Janis had an entirely different vibe, one that girls responded to and we, apparently, didn't.
One time I asked what was that painful screeching noise and was told it was Janis Joplin. I didn't get it, couldn't deal with it and tuned it out. The sloppiness of Big Brother's early playing didn't help endear me to the music either, used as I was to the precision musicianship of bands like Jethro Tull and Yes. I suppose I was still unconsciously comparing everything to classical music.
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Sonata #3 by Mike Neville
Mixed media on board
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Time went on. Sometimes we'd see Grateful Dead or Doors tribute bands, and I came to appreciate the grooviness of their jamming. In the late seventies on Long Island there were still big "rock clubs," but it was at the neighborhood bars where you'd hear the Big Brother and Janis Joplin hits on the jukebox. I was not too inebriated to know that someone had to be feeding money to that jukebox and requesting those songs. Guys would sing along to "Roadhouse Blues" and "Satisfaction" but girls would sing along to "Piece of My Heart" and "Me and Bobby McGee." And once more, with feeling. And again, and again. Obviously I was missing something.
I had taken the time to understand and appreciate rock that, at first, seemed chaotic (The Who), monotonous (The Doors), needlessly violent (Led Zeppelin) and vocally distasteful (Neil Young). But it took me longer to give Janis a closer listen. I can't remember a specific moment when I first heard AND APPRECIATED Janis, but I know it didn't happen until I'd known Halley for a while.
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Halley was a crazy chick I'd known in high school and started dating in college. She went to an acting conservatory where everybody was just as crazy as she was (so much so that I felt painfully normal and shy around them). Halley didn't sing much, mostly acted, but occasionally she'd sit in with the house band at a club and belt out a Cars or Talking Heads song. Meanwhile I was working on a David Bowie musical revue (I'm not kidding) at my college, and got Halley to sneak away from her freshman plebe duties at acting school and sing in our show, which - performing under the name Isopropyl Pavlova so her acting faculty wouldn't find out she was moonlighting - she promptly stole. (If you do follow this link, note also the presence of the now well-known Hollywood character actor Dean Norris in the cast.)
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That's where I learned that Halley could sing with real - so to speak - balls. And she could sound like Janis. When she wanted to, she could practically channel Janis. Because her older sister listened to "Cheap Thrills" at home when she was growing up, Halley internalized Janis's vocalisms from earliest childhood. Years later, after Halley toured with Big Brother in the flesh, guitarist Sam Andrew noted, "I just love her. She learned twenty of our songs without having any rehearsal with the band. She just stepped on stage in Providence, Rhode Island, and sang two sets with us as if she had been doing it for ten years. I have never seen anything like that." Well, in a sense Halley HAD been doing it for ten years - in fact, for her whole life.
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So, here I was, a guy loaded with testosterone and romanticism (the same thing?), who thought of Joan Jett when I thought of women who rocked if I thought of women who rocked at all, into Bowie, Tull, the Stones, and current stuff like Talking Heads and the B-52s and weird stuff like the Residents and the early Human League, but fortunate enough to have met a living embodiment of the kind of female power Janis Joplin had both represented and created. Our musical careers lay in the future, but indirectly Janis Joplin's life's work had entered my life to stay.
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