![]() I’ve been looking around, and I’ve noticed something. Two years ago, I didn’t even want to be ‘it.’ No, that’s not true. “I managed to pass my 27th birthday without really feeling it,” she wrote in a letter home months before her death. Her growing heroin habit is documented in the film via first-hand accounts of those closest to Joplin (her bandmates from Big Brother and the Holding Company, her friend Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead), and their stories of her demise are wrenching.īut the deepest insight as to why Joplin imploded comes from the singer herself. She numbed that pain with short-lived relationships, a drinking habit formed in high school and, later, drugs that were the lifeblood of 1960s San Francisco. If they settle for being someone’s dishwasher, that’s her own … problem.”Īs “Little Girl Blue” attests, the intensity and raw emotion that made Joplin a great artist also made her life a chaotic, unhappy and lonely affair. When asked by an interviewer why there weren’t more women like her in music, she answered, “You are what you settle for. ![]() But this was before the age of pop celebrity media training and politically correct responses. Unpolished even in terms of the era, Joplin broke ground for every female rock and pop performer in her wake and did it in the course of an absurdly short career. Joplin didn’t wave the flag of feminism, she embodied it. The reaction of audiences, who were floored and almost blindsided by the sheer passion of Joplin, illustrates what a true anomaly she was in a rock world populated almost entirely of men. In just two notes, she said, they could “make you feel like they told you the whole universe.”įamiliar footage of Joplin performing at Monterey and Woodstock feels fresh given all the personal context the film provides leading to those breakthrough moments in her career. ![]() When writing to her parents about why music mattered to her above college, marriage and everything else they’d hoped for their daughter, she mentions Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday. Cat Power) narrates the letters, which have never before been released to the public. ![]() Indie folk singer/songwriter Chan Marshall (a.k.a. From this pastiche Joplin emerges as we’ve never seen her before, articulate, ambitious, torn between her wild self and her desperate need for stability.īut the closest we get to her are in letters she wrote to her family from the time she left Port Arthur for San Francisco in the early ‘60s until her death in Los Angeles in 1970 at age 27. ![]()
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