JANIS JOPLIN's 2020 LEGACY

 

Our friend Harvey Kubernik just contributed a Sept. 4, 2020 feature story to Music Connection Magazine on 2020 legacy of Janis Joplin. Here's the bit he added from me:

 

Heather Harris: "Martin Scorsese used the rousing rocker 'Combination Of The Two' by Big Brother and the Holding Company in his best soundtrack film Bringing Out the Dead, (1999) to encapsulate two out of control professionals on the move at the speed of light. No one says "completely crazy" quite like actor Tom Sizemore, and his character's partner Nicolas Cage was dealing with the life and death import of their job as ambulance medics by trying it Sizemore's way for a night, in this case completely nutso. ‘Combination’ was the stone cold consummate choice for this scene, even if it features less of lead singer Janis Joplin in this track. That particular band and her WERE out of control professionals, delivering life affirming songs and shrieks despite the reminders of everyday mortality. Perfection!

"Combination Of The Two’ began the second album by Big Brother And the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills with the equally legendary artwork by prototypical San Francisco psychedelic cartoonist R. Crumb. It fit the era of coordinated act and art as superbly as the Sgt. Pepper cover had and was just as original."

 

“In a better universe, Janis should have had a long career as not only a topflight interpretive singer but also patron saint of undervalued women who achieve. What does it do to the psyche for a young girl to be voted ‘Ugliest Man on Campus’ by her so-called student peers? In her case it became source material. That's how someone in their teens and mid-twenties mustered the moxie to sing of pain with breathtaking exactness of emotions."

 

“Janis Joplin is one of the few dinosaur era legends always embraced by each succeeding generation. Her ability to transmit the universality of pain transcends all the folklore of the 1960s.

“I never had the pleasure to see or photograph her, but my husband Mr. Twister said she was the only act he'd ever seen wherein immediately after one of her heart-wrenching showstopper ballads the audience was stunned into awestruck, hear-a-pin-drop silence. He only saw her at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles and the old Fillmore in San Francisco. I wonder which of the two audiences proved that reverent?”