Janis Joplin carried all the others

This year she would have turned 80, but misfortune immortalized Janis Joplin at 27. It is not entirely accurate to consider her the first great female rock star; If anything, she was the first to perform for hundreds of thousands of people at those massive festivals of the late sixties. She never believed herself to be the first: she carried with her the legacy of the blues pioneers and the first Rock And Roll (Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton); of folk (Odetta) and jazz (Billie Holiday). She was a contemporary of Tina Turner and Aretha Fraklin (with whom she wanted to compete), but they began her careers before.

Joplin had listened to very good records when she burst onto the music scene in 1966 to shine brightly for less than four years. And this white girl from Texas recovered in her albums and concerts the songs of those African-American women who came before her and did not achieve the relevance they deserved. Interpreted in the Janis way, yes. Only. With that energy that left her exhausted and the audience speechless.

The best documentary to know the goddess of the hippies It is simply titled Janis (in the original version Janis: Little Girl Blue) and is available in Filmin and Movistar+. It was directed by Amy Berg in 2015 and it has everything: intense performances, rehearsals and talks in which we see her very spontaneous, interviews with everyone around her: her family, her bandmates, her partners. And, above all, the letters that she never stopped writing to her family, in which she confessed her insecurities and celebrated her successes, messages that become the thread as if she had written the script. .

There are nuances in the cliché of a tormented girl, who had never fit in in her hometown, Port Arthur, where she suffered harassment and felt inadequate, who did not find sentimental stability and who channeled that rage by singing blues in a heartbreaking way. That cliché is relativized because we also see a very excited Joplin since she moved to San Francisco, where she immersed herself in the cultural revolution that was brewing; that she feels fulfilled when she stands in front of a group; that she did love the men and women who loved her, although some betrayed her; that she overcame her adolescent complexes to build an iconic image in her time. That she is invited to Monterey in 1967, for the first big festival hippy, and comes out elevated. That she had three bands (Big Brother and the Holding Company, Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie Band) because it was believed that none were up to her standards. We almost always see her smiling, even when she is confessing her frustrations, because she did not keep quiet either in the interviews or in what she said between songs.

This heroine, the artist, had the heroine, the opiate, as a villain. Her addiction is related here to a personality given to carrying the pain of others, and to the need to escape after performances so heartfelt that they emptied her. She shot herself after singing, so that it would not affect her performance; However, at the 1969 Woodstock festival she went on stage very high. It was not her best concert, but it was worthy, and one of her most remembered. She managed to get rid of that vice, although not alcohol; She wanted to disconnect from everything and toured Brazil with her backpack and a boyfriend she found on the road. When she died of an overdose in 1970, everyone considered her rehabilitated. The story does not support the thesis of self-destruction: it was an accident, she alone intended to give herself a last tribute.

The tragedy deprived us of everything that would have given us later. No, Janis was not the first, but she was one of the greatest. Her example paved the way for her not to be, she could not nor did she want to be, the last.