How good a blues singer was Janis Joplin, who died 40 years ago yesterday?
Janis was good enough to be mentioned in the same breadth as Billie Holiday.
Janis transcended the 60s while dying in 1970.
Janis was great enough to be above the genre that raised her. Great enough to be beyond the hippies, or acid rock, or Woodstock. She was so great that in the space of four albums she legitimized a strain of pop music.
Larry Schneiderman mentioned to me that in the Summer of 1968 he was in Los Angeles and went to see Janis sing at the Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. The promoters had failed to pay their bills and at the last moment the electricity was cut.
Janis went on stage, lit by house lights using auxiliary electricity but with no mic, no amplification. Schneiderman was in the back of the hall. “You could hear a pin drop” he remembers. “And her voice was so powerful and so loud it filled the entire hall”.
I have seen one performer sing without a mic. That would be Tony Bennett who did it for one song at Radio City Music Hall. But to do it in a rock concert setting? For an entire set? Unheard of.
Everything Joplin did was unheard of and never heard of since.