She was the only woman, and she was the only one who died of something that could be described as a long-festering disease.
To date, there have been six musicians who went to #1 after dying. Joplin departed in October of 1970, 16 days after Jimi Hendrix. And then she died alone in a Hollywood hotel room after shooting up. She travelled the planet, slept with men and women, and tried every drug she could find - though she also went through periods where she tried to get clean. Her voice - ragged, ferocious, force-of-nature powerful - imprinted itself on a whole generation of kids.
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She became a rock star, first singing for Big Brother & The Holding Company and then going solo and leading a series of her own bands. She came home, got clean, then returned to San Francisco and got hooked again. Joplin found her way to San Francisco and got herself hooked on heroin. Joplin started singing - first at local coffeehouses, and then at coffeehouses in Austin, where she was briefly a college student. But she’d discovered old blues records, Bessie Smith records in particular, and through them, she’d found her superpower. This quiet girl had grown up in Port Arthur, Texas, bullied and stultified by the yokels around her.
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He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth.Janis Joplin was a terribly romantic figure, and her life story reads like a myth. Two of Kristofferson's Highwaymen band mates - Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash - would record the song too.Ĭraig Hlavaty is a reporter for and. In the years after Joplin's death a multitude of other artists would record the song including Loretta Lynn, The Grateful Dead, Olivia Newton-John, and Dolly Parton. When he sings it to this day he always thinks of Joplin. He said later he had to listen to it until he was sick of it so it wouldn’t make him bust out all over again. LOVE, JANIS: On tour with Janis Joplin - an insider's view I couldn’t listen to the song without really breaking up,” Kristofferson said. Afterwards, I walked all over L.A., just in tears. “Paul Rothchild, her producer, asked me to stop by his office and listen to this thing she had cut. Kristofferson didn’t hear Joplin’s version of his song until right after she died in late 1970. Roger Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, and Kenny Rogers and The First Edition all recorded their own takes before Joplin got her hands on it. Joplin wasn't the first musician to record the song. The ambiguity of the name Bobby has made it easy for both male and female singers to cover it. That’s where the line ‘Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose’ came from,” Kristofferson added.
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He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him. He changed the main details around to focus on a rich Americana-laden landscape but the intimate notions remained. Kristofferson said the feeling conveyed at the end of the film informed “Bobby McGee” and its song structure. He’s drunk and ends up howling at the stars on the beach.” That night, Quinn goes to a bar and gets in a fight. He asks, ‘Where did you hear that song?’ And she tells him it was this little girl who had showed up in town and nobody knew where she was from, and later she died. “Later in the film, he sees this woman hanging out the wash and singing the melody that the girl used to play on the trombone. LITTLE GIRL BLUE: Michelle Williams the latest actress attached to a Janis Joplin biopic He got to the point where he couldn’t put up with her anymore and left her by the side of the road while she was sleeping,” he said. “For some reason, I thought of ‘La Strada,’ this Fellini film, and a scene where Anthony Quinn is going around on this motorcycle and Giulietta Masina is the feeble-minded girl with him, playing the trombone. I started singing in that meter,” Kristofferson told Performing Songwriter magazine in 2008.Īs Kristofferson’s body of work has proven, he takes influences from all over the place, not just fellow musicians. “There was a Mickey Newbury song that was going through my mind-‘Why You Been Gone So Long?’ It had a rhythm that I really liked. She was apparently cute enough for Foster to need to make frequent visits to. He pitched Kristofferson “Me and Bobby McKee” with the songwriter mishearing it as “McGee.” The new name stuck.īarbara "Bobby" McKee was a secretary at an office that Foster would visit on Nashville's Music Row. WILLIE AND TRIGGER: Willie Nelson's guitar 'Trigger' subject of Rolling Stone documentaryĪccording to the Brownsville-born Kristofferson, the title came from producer and Monument Records founder Fred Foster who called him up one night with a title but no song. The story behind “Me and Bobby McGee,” which would become a Joplin classic, is actually rather cinematic.
Singer-songwriter Kristofferson is still revered for his talent at a turn of a phrase and the way he could fuse that with hook.
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