‘Pearl’ by Janis Joplin and The Full Tilt Boogie Band
Today for Girl Power Week we are jumping back in time. Way back when hippies were more than the smoke weed, drop acid, love everyone, no job, listen to ‘Dark Side of the Moon‘ two dimensional joke they are today, 1970. While the vast majority of the musical world at the time was long haired, dirty dudes trying to stop a war, there was someone there who just wanted to sing the blues. I’m preaching about the one, the only, the radiant, Miss Janis Lyn Joplin.
Janis didn’t have to say anything about the Vietnam war, although she often did, to be standing in protest. She was a woman in pop music who dressed outrageously, spoke her mine and did what she wanted. She drank, swore and lived in excess. Like Bikini Kill show girls they could be in a punk rock band, Janis showed women they didn’t have to be housewives. They could be a bit wild and live freely. Janis went up on stage and sang the blue to people telling them in her own way that she was proud to be a strong woman and would only settle for a strong man that treated her right. I gotta tell you, if I was around then I would have volunteered.
This album, ‘Pearl’, was her first with The Full Tilt Boogie Band and unfortunately her last. During the time they were recording this album she died of a heroin overdose before it was completed. In fact, the track ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’ is only instrumental because of her untimely death. This is Janis at the peak of her fame. Throughout the album is a sense of comfort and a laid back, natural attitude that even goes so far as light hearted tracks like ‘Mercedes Benz’. Of corse that doesn’t stop Janis and the band from getting down to business. As with anything Janis did, it was passionate. This woman sang her soul out on every track. Every word was belted out with all the emotion she had to try and somehow let you feel everything she feels and she does it better than anyone. She was a true blues singer.
After her death, Janis was one of the four inductees from the 60’s counterculture, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones being the other three, to join the 27 Club with Robert Johnson, making it a real club. The hippie culture would go the way of every other movement in America and be commercialized and fade away. Many would come after Janis, some good and some bad but none of them would ever make the same impression on rock’n’roll.
Song: ‘Get It While You Can’
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