{"id":73737,"date":"2019-10-23T17:05:56","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T15:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73737"},"modified":"2019-10-16T13:56:09","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T11:56:09","slug":"10-05-46","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73737","title":{"rendered":"Reminiscens: – Janis Joplin\u2019s Electric Energy (March 8, 1969)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Janis Joplin\u2019s Electric Energy (March 8, 1969)<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ellen Willis<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Photograph by Evening Standard \/ Getty<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When I saw Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Fillmore East last August, Janis Joplin put on the most exalting, exhausting concert I have ever been privileged to see, hear, and feel. Euphoric from Bill Graham\u2019s champagne, she sang four encores, and the audience, standing on the seats, wouldn\u2019t go home. Finally, she came back onstage. \u201cI love you, honey,\u201d she said, gasping, \u201cbut I just got nothing left.\u201d Someday, we were sure, it would really be true\u2014someday soon, if she kept giving like that. I didn\u2019t know if I wanted the responsibility of taking; I felt a little like a vampire. From now on, I decided, after two encores I stop clapping.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then Janis quit Big Brother. Everyone who cared about her\u2014which means just about every rock fan\u2014had seen it coming for some time.<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, she was a star, well out of everyone else\u2019s class\u2014writers had even stopped comparing her to Grace Slick. And, even for a star, her ego was sizable. Besides, the band wasn\u2019t good enough, or so most of the fans and critics thought. I wasn\u2019t sure. The group was a good foil for Janis; better musicians might have tried to compete. And its members were (or, rather, appeared to be) fun-loving hippies who teased Janis out of her suffering, made it part of a greater happiness: joyous blues. (For an idea of the effect, if you\u2019ve never seen Big Brother perform, imagine the early Beatles backing up Mick Jagger during his \u201cWhat a Shame\u201d phase.) Still, audiences came to see Janis, not the group, and that fact made it hard to hold on to the myth of all-part-of-one-great-thing San Francisco communalism. It also strained relations a bit. So Janis left to form her own backup band, which would be, from the start and without misunderstandings, a backup band. We worried: Will Success Spoil Janis? Will she become overconfident, lazy, mechanical? Did Big Brother perhaps give her more than we realized? Will she lose it\u2014it<\/em>\u2014without them?<\/span><\/p>\n

The first test came a couple of weeks ago, when Janis returned to the Fillmore East for a two-night engagement with her as yet unnamed new group. The night before she arrived, a friend of mine, also a rock reviewer, had a nightmare: the concert was a flop, Janis kept walking down the aisles futilely begging the audience to respond. When I went to the Fillmore, I felt as if I were going to watch my best friend put herself on the line: I hoped she would do well, but I knew I\u2019d<\/em> like her anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

The show I saw wasn\u2019t a flop. And though it wasn\u2019t great, either, at this point the deficiencies can be attributed to growing pains. Janis has apparently decided to stop killing herself or to experiment with new styles\u2014probably both.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her performance was very low-keyed, but she wasn\u2019t letting down; she was consciously striving for a cooler, subtler delivery that would contain her energy without diluting it. It worked pretty well. What was missing was a sense of authority; Janis did not know exactly where she was going, and she was not completely at home with her band or (this may be just projection) sure the audience would accept her. The (white) band is straight Memphis soul, and its arrangements are excellent, though I found the horns a bit obtrusive\u2014the trumpet player kept upstaging Janis, and a few times actually drowned her out.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Real Memphis musicians would never do that.) Perhaps the most telling commentary on the performance was that the highlights were Janis\u2019s staples\u2014\u201cPiece of My Heart\u201d and (especially) \u201cBall and Chain,\u201d subdued but given new inflections by the band and by Janis herself. But I was also impressed by her renditions of a couple of Nick Gravenites songs and the Chantels\u2019 \u201cMaybe.\u201d The Joshua Light Show, which usually provides a mediocre background to Fillmore concerts, added some great visual effects. One innovation was to put Janis\u2019s face on closed-circuit TV and project it, greatly enlarged, on the screen in back of the stage, so that we could watch her changing expression as she sang. And during one song huge, multicolored phallic projections were hurled at her head in time to the beat. Very nice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, yes. The audience loved Janis. A kid climbed up on the stage and gave her flowers. If the law of conservation of energy has any validity, for the next year or so she can earn her standing ovation just by showing up.<\/span><\/p>\n

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