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By the middle of 1966, several old San Francisco friends had got together a promising rock band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. Since the Jefferson Airplane had Signe Anderson (later replaced by Grace Slick), the boys sent for Janis to be their lead singer. She began to learn about rock 'n' roll, and to please her, they began to learn about the blues. By the time of the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, after months of hard practicing in Haight-Ashbury, they were ready. The documentary film Monterey Pop is the celluloid affidavit of their triumph.
A year and a half later, Janis, reaching for superstardom, quit the group and moved out on her own. With a little help from Albert Grossman, who also manages Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and The Band, she soon developed into the world's top female rock singer, commanding as much as $50,000 a night. Like her idol Bessie Smith, Janis had a singing style as earthy as a streetwalker. There were myriad subtle ways in which her voice could range from a deep throaty groan to a high tender croon. When she licked into a phrase like "Oh, I'd be so good to ya, babe, yeah!" (Turtle Blues), there was no mistaking the kind of ecstasy she had in mind.
Tragic Gamble. Too young at 27, too important to the lives of millions of her generational kin, Janis died unaccountably at a time when life seemed ready, for a change, to offer some answers. She was as aware as anyone of the deaths of major talents who tragically thought drugs were something they could gamble with and win; most recently there was the death of the king of rock erotica, Jimi Hendrix. In the fall of 1969, she was taking a six-month vacation "to clear my head." By last February she claimed to have kicked heroin. "I don't touch drugs," she told an interviewer at the time. "These kids who touch drugs are crazy when they can have a drink of Southern Comfort."
Just recently she acquired her first steady beau, Seth Morgan, 21, an affluent Easterner from Blue Hill, Me., who thrilled Janis by, among other things, paying the dinner checks she always used to have to pick up herself, even when in a crowd. To her friends, she talked casually of the possibility of marriage. Her new back-up group, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, had got excellent notices on a coast-to-coast tour last summer. Recording sessions for Columbia—six-day-a-week affairs, often running from 2 p.m. to midnight—had been going well. Out of ten songs planned for her new album, she had only two left to complete. One was Buried Alive in the Blues by her friend Nick Gravenites. Sample verse: "All caught up in a landslide, bad luck pressing in from all sides/ Got bucked off of my easy ride, buried alive in the blues." For pop singers, the alternative to a hit is oblivion. Janis Joplin had big hopes for Buried Alive.