Janice Joplin overdose death
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Janis Joplin was an American singer/songwriter who rose to fame during the free-love era of the 1960s, but died at the age of 27 after overdosing on heroin. Joplin was a member of the psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company before breaking off to become a successful solo artist.
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Early Years
While still in high school, Joplin was a painter who began singing blues and folk music with a group of outcasts that she befriended. As a teenager, she became overweight and she experienced acne problems that left her with deep scars requiring dermabrasion. Her peers routinely taunted her, calling her names like “pig,” “freak,” or “creep.”
Though she didn’t complete her college degree, she attended Lamar State College of Technologyin Beaumont, Texas and the University of Texas at Austin. The campus newspaper ran a profile of her in 1962 entitled, “She Dares to Be Different.” That same year, she recorded her first song at the home of a fellow student, called “What Good Can Drinkin’ Do.” Joplin left Texas in 1963 for San Francisco, where she began playing music with future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen. Around this time she began using amphetamine and heroin, as well as other psychoactive drugs. She also drank heavily, and was known to prefer Southern Comfort.
Amphetamine Use
In 1965, Joplin’s friends described her as “skeletal” and “emaciated” due to her amphetamine habit, and persuaded her to return to Texas, where she changed her lifestyle, avoiding drugs and alcohol for a time. The next year, she was recruited to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. She moved with the band and the Grateful Dead to Lagunitas, California, where Joplin relapsed into using hard drugs.
Heroin Addiction
After splitting from Big Brother in 1969, Joplin formed a backup group and began singing on her own. During this time, she became addicted to heroin, reportedly shooting up at least $200 worth of the drugs per day. At the end of the year, the group broke up, and Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped using drugs and drinking and met David (George) Niehaus, an American school teacher, with whom she fell in love.
When she returned to the United States in 1970, Joplin began using again, and her relationship with Niehaus ended due to her addiction. Joplin then started another band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, with whom she toured for several months. On June 25, 1970, she appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, and announced that she was going to attend her ten-year high-school class reunion. When asked if she was popular in high school, she said her schoolmates “laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state.” She later told a reporter that she only entertained at her high school when she “walked down the aisles.”
Death
Her last public performance was on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston, Massachusetts. The next month, Joplin and her band began recording a new album in Los Angeles, although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed. “Mercedes Benz” was included in the album despite it being a first take, and the result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971).
The last recordings Joplin completed were “Mercedes Benz” and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1, 1970. On October 3rd, she listened to a track at the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, and was scheduled to come back the next day to record the vocals. When she didn’t show up the next day, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned and the band’s road manager drove to the motel where Joplin had been staying. He found her body on the floor of her room.
The official cause of death was ruled an overdose of heroin, possibly enhanced by the effects of alcohol. Joplin’s ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean along Stinson Beach. At the time of her death, she had recently become engaged to 21-year-old Seth Morgan, a student at Berkeley and a cocaine dealer who later became a novelist.
Joplin was a pioneer in the male-dominated rock music scene of the late 1960s, influencing generations of musicians to come, including Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks. After seeing Joplin perform, Nicks was quoted as saying, “I knew that a little bit of my destiny had changed. I would search to find that connection that I had seen between Janis and her audience. In a blink of an eye she changed my life.”
