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Bach substitute

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

Janis (BBC Radio 2); Have Your Cake (BBC Radio 4)

I’m not sure that I’d have listened to this programme from choice, never being able to understand what was so appealing about such raw, over-the-top girning. But there was so much hype about Janis, presented by the new face of frock rock, Beth Ditto, that I thought I should give it a try. By the end I was convinced that there’s been nothing like Joplin since her untimely death in a hotel room in October 1970, aged only 27. Her performances had such primeval energy, such overwhelming impact that she was a brilliant way to forget about Bach. In her own way you could say that Janis was striving to do the same thing: to pin down through musical expression the experience of being human.

How did she do it? And where did that extraordinary voice come from?

She was born, Ditto revealed perkily, in Port Arthur, in southern Texas. Her father was a bit of a misfit in that oil-rich town, reading Dante in his spare time and listening to his collection of classical LPs. Joplin as a child grew up listening to Dvorak and Elgar. But after puberty she changed, revealed her younger sister Laura. She became more emotional, and there were lots of arguments as her parents ‘tried to change her approach so that life would not be so challenging for her’.

At school she stood up and announced that white society in the USofA had treated African–Americans all wrong (this was the late 1950s and Texas was still segregated), and she discovered a talent for singing in the style of the black blues singer Odetta. But it was not until Monterey in 1967 that she suddenly burst on to the rock scene, ‘a chick from Texas’ who stole the show because of the huge spontaneity and raw power of her performance. Pictures taken of the performance (you can see them on YouTube) show Mama Cass sitting there open-mouthed.

‘My career would be nothing without her,’ said Ditto at the end of this exemplary documentary (produced by Sue Clark), which took the trouble to seek out not the obvious suspects but Joplin’s siblings and her road manager John Cooke (son of Alistair, according to Radio Times, so it must be right), who discovered her body. He said she was not tragic and sad at the end, not at all. In fact, she had kicked heroin and was working with a new confidence and professionalism. Two of the songs that she was recording at the time of her death became her greatest hits, including what has become her signature tune, ‘Mercedes Benz’.