In 1967, Joplin rose to prominence following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company.
88 Facts About Janis Joplin
2.
Janis Joplin appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival and on the Festival Express train tour.
3.
Five singles by Janis Joplin reached the US Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee", which reached number one in March 1971.
4.
Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970, at the age of 27, after releasing three albums.
5.
Janis Joplin was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
6.
Janis Joplin remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 18.5 million albums sold.
7.
Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on January 19,1943, to Dorothy Bonita East, a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin, an engineer at Texaco.
8.
Janis Joplin's parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children.
9.
Janis Joplin began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School.
10.
Janis Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school.
11.
Janis Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin, though she did not complete her college studies.
12.
Janis Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets.
13.
Janis Joplin left Texas in January 1963, hitchhiking with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco.
14.
In 1963, Janis Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting.
15.
Janis Joplin used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort.
16.
Back in Port Arthur in the spring of 1965, after Janis Joplin's parents noticed her weight of 88 pounds, she changed her lifestyle.
17.
Janis Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc in the fall of 1965.
18.
Janis Joplin had begun a relationship with him toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco.
19.
In 1965 and 1966, Janis Joplin commuted from her family's Port Arthur home to Beaumont, Texas, where she had regular sessions with a psychiatric social worker named Bernard Giarritano at a counseling agency that was funded by the United Fund, which after her death changed its name to the United Way.
20.
Janis Joplin sometimes brought an acoustic guitar with her to her sessions with Giarritano, and people in other offices within the building could hear her singing.
21.
Janis Joplin said that if she were to avoid singing professionally, she would have to become a keypunch operator or a secretary, and then a wife and mother, and she would have to become very similar to all the other women in Port Arthur.
22.
Approximately a year before Janis Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, she recorded seven studio tracks with her acoustic guitar.
23.
Janis Joplin was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier.
24.
Janis Joplin met Travis Rivers, with whom she shared an apartment upon their arrival in San Francisco, promising that using needles would not be allowed there.
25.
Janis Joplin was screaming and crying and Travis walked in.
26.
Janis Joplin had a short relationship and longer friendship with founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.
27.
In early 1967, Janis Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish.
28.
Janis Joplin is seen wearing an expensive gold tunic dress with matching pants.
29.
The other members of Big Brother thought that Janis Joplin was on a "star trip", while others were telling Janis Joplin that Big Brother was a terrible band and that she ought to dump them.
30.
Janis Joplin sang take after take of the same song, with her performances consistently good, and she grew frustrated with the band's sloppiness.
31.
Janis, which was reviewed by The Washington Post on March 21,1975, shows Joplin arriving in Frankfurt by plane and waiting inside a bus next to the Frankfurt venue, while an American female fan who is visiting Germany expresses enthusiasm to the camera.
32.
Janis Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig.
33.
On Saturday afternoon, when she and the band were flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother from a nearby motel to the festival site and Janis Joplin saw the enormous crowd, she instantly became extremely nervous and giddy.
34.
Janis Joplin referred them to her friend and sometime lover Peggy Caserta as she was too excited to speak.
35.
Janis Joplin pulled through and engaged frequently with the crowd, asking them if they had everything they needed and if they were staying stoned.
36.
The audience cheered for an encore, to which Janis Joplin replied and sang "Ball and Chain".
37.
Janis Joplin remained at Woodstock for the remainder of the festival.
38.
Janis Joplin was ultimately unhappy with her performance and blamed Caserta.
39.
Janis Joplin's singing was not included in the 1970 documentary film or the soundtrack for Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, although the 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes her performance of "Work Me, Lord".
40.
Biographer Myra Friedman said she had witnessed a duet Janis Joplin sang with Tina Turner during the Rolling Stones concert at the Garden on Thanksgiving Day.
41.
In February 1970, Janis Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use.
42.
Janis Joplin was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites, who had designed Janis's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969.
43.
In Brazil, Janis Joplin was romanced by a fellow American tourist named David Niehaus, who was traveling around the world.
44.
Janis Joplin tried law school, but when he met Janis he was taking time off.
45.
Niehaus and Janis Joplin were photographed by the press at Rio Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
46.
When Janis Joplin returned to the US, she began using heroin again.
47.
Janis Joplin took a more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie band than she had with her prior group.
48.
Janis Joplin became very happy with her new group, which eventually received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics.
49.
Janis Joplin performed with the band, billed as Main Squeeze, at a party for the Hells Angels at a venue in San Rafael, California on May 21,1970, according to a web site maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew.
50.
Janis Joplin was like a parody of what she was at her best.
51.
Janis Joplin's singing was real flabby, no edge at all.
52.
Shortly thereafter, Janis Joplin began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair.
53.
Janis Joplin jammed with the other performers on the train, and her performances on this tour are considered to be among her greatest.
54.
Janis Joplin finished the Calgary concert with long versions of "Get It While You Can" and "Ball and Chain".
55.
Janis Joplin chose the new costumes after her friend and designer, Linda Gravenites, cut ties with Joplin shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.
56.
Janis Joplin had been at home in Larkspur, California when she had received a long-distance phone call with an explanation of the need to finance a gravestone for Bessie Smith, whom Janis Joplin had frequently cited as a musical influence.
57.
Janis Joplin immediately wrote a check and mailed it to the name and address provided by the phone caller.
58.
Janis Joplin came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV.
59.
Janis Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit.
60.
The opening track, "Move Over", was written by Janis Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships.
61.
Janis Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24,1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album.
62.
Janis Joplin told her construction crew to design a carport to be shaped like a flying saucer, according to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died.
63.
Peggy Caserta claimed in her book, Going Down With Janis, that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use.
64.
Janis Joplin learned of Caserta's presence at the Landmark from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there.
65.
In September 1970, Grossman and Friedman, who worked out of a New York office, knew Janis Joplin was staying at a Los Angeles hotel, but were unaware it was a haven for drug users and dealers.
66.
Janis Joplin thought Joplin sounded on the phone like she was less depressed than she had been over the summer.
67.
On September 26,1970, Janis Joplin recorded vocals for "Half Moon" and "Cry Baby".
68.
On October 1,1970, Janis Joplin completed her last recording, "Mercedes Benz", which was recorded in a single take.
69.
People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Janis Joplin expressing anger about the state of her relationship with Morgan, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions.
70.
Evidently, Janis Joplin had a friendly conversation with a young man whom she did not know, and he expressed admiration for her music.
71.
Janis Joplin had met her several times but did not know her.
72.
Approximately a month after Caserta attended the concert, Janis Joplin visited her boutique and said she could not afford to buy a pair of jeans that was for sale, instead asking to put down the first 50 cents on the $5 item.
73.
Janis Joplin did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with Caserta's disappointment.
74.
Janis Joplin mentioned her disappointment to her drug dealer on Saturday, while he was selling her the dose of heroin that killed her, as Caserta later learned from the drug dealer.
75.
Janis Joplin was not heir to an ego so cohesive as to permit her an identity one way or the other.
76.
On Sunday evening, October 4,1970, Janis Joplin was found dead on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel by her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke.
77.
Noguchi performed an autopsy on Janis Joplin and determined the cause of death to be a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol.
78.
Caserta admitted to waiting until late Saturday night to dial the Landmark switchboard, only to learn that Janis Joplin had instructed the desk clerk not to accept any incoming phone calls for her after midnight.
79.
Janis Joplin used a phone at Sunset Sound Recorders where her colleagues noticed that whatever Morgan said to her made her very angry.
80.
Janis Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean.
81.
Janis Joplin couldn't find her, so he went for her lover.
82.
When Joplin was alive, Country Joe McDonald released a song called "Janis" on his band's album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die.
83.
In 1995, Janis Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
84.
Also in 2009, Janis Joplin was the honoree at the Rock Hall's American Music Master concert and lecture series.
85.
In 2013, Washington's Arena Stage featured a production of A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies.
86.
On November 4,2013, Janis Joplin was awarded with the 2,510th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the music industry.
87.
Janis Joplin's star is located at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of Musicians Institute.
88.
Janis Joplin was so witty and charming and intelligent, but she battled an ugly-duckling syndrome.