Janis Joplin’s Electric Energy (March 8, 1969)

Ellen Willis

Photograph by Evening Standard / Getty

When I saw Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Fillmore East last August, Janis Joplin put on the most exalting, exhausting concert I have ever been privileged to see, hear, and feel. Euphoric from Bill Graham’s champagne, she sang four encores, and the audience, standing on the seats, wouldn’t go home. Finally, she came back onstage. “I love you, honey,” she said, gasping, “but I just got nothing left.” Someday, we were sure, it would really be true—someday soon, if she kept giving like that. I didn’t know if I wanted the responsibility of taking; I felt a little like a vampire. From now on, I decided, after two encores I stop clapping.

Then Janis quit Big Brother. Everyone who cared about her—which means just about every rock fan—had seen it coming for some time.

After all, she was a star, well out of everyone else’s class—writers had even stopped comparing her to Grace Slick. And, even for a star, her ego was sizable. Besides, the band wasn’t good enough, or so most of the fans and critics thought. I wasn’t sure. The group was a good foil for Janis; better musicians might have tried to compete. And its members were (or, rather, appeared to be) fun-loving hippies who teased Janis out of her suffering, made it part of a greater happiness: joyous blues. (For an idea of the effect, if you’ve never seen Big Brother perform, imagine the early Beatles backing up Mick Jagger during his “What a Shame” phase.) Still, audiences came to see Janis, not the group, and that fact made it hard to hold on to the myth of all-part-of-one-great-thing San Francisco communalism. It also strained relations a bit. So Janis left to form her own backup band, which would be, from the start and without misunderstandings, a backup band. We worried: Will Success Spoil Janis? Will she become overconfident, lazy, mechanical? Did Big Brother perhaps give her more than we realized? Will she lose it—it—without them?

The first test came a couple of weeks ago, when Janis returned to the Fillmore East for a two-night engagement with her as yet unnamed new group. The night before she arrived, a friend of mine, also a rock reviewer, had a nightmare: the concert was a flop, Janis kept walking down the aisles futilely begging the audience to respond. When I went to the Fillmore, I felt as if I were going to watch my best friend put herself on the line: I hoped she would do well, but I knew I’d like her anyway.

The show I saw wasn’t a flop. And though it wasn’t great, either, at this point the deficiencies can be attributed to growing pains. Janis has apparently decided to stop killing herself or to experiment with new styles—probably both.

Her performance was very low-keyed, but she wasn’t letting down; she was consciously striving for a cooler, subtler delivery that would contain her energy without diluting it. It worked pretty well. What was missing was a sense of authority; Janis did not know exactly where she was going, and she was not completely at home with her band or (this may be just projection) sure the audience would accept her. The (white) band is straight Memphis soul, and its arrangements are excellent, though I found the horns a bit obtrusive—the trumpet player kept upstaging Janis, and a few times actually drowned her out.

(Real Memphis musicians would never do that.) Perhaps the most telling commentary on the performance was that the highlights were Janis’s staples—“Piece of My Heart” and (especially) “Ball and Chain,” subdued but given new inflections by the band and by Janis herself. But I was also impressed by her renditions of a couple of Nick Gravenites songs and the Chantels’ “Maybe.” The Joshua Light Show, which usually provides a mediocre background to Fillmore concerts, added some great visual effects. One innovation was to put Janis’s face on closed-circuit TV and project it, greatly enlarged, on the screen in back of the stage, so that we could watch her changing expression as she sang. And during one song huge, multicolored phallic projections were hurled at her head in time to the beat. Very nice.

Oh, yes. The audience loved Janis. A kid climbed up on the stage and gave her flowers. If the law of conservation of energy has any validity, for the next year or so she can earn her standing ovation just by showing up.

This article appears in the print edition of the March 15, 1969, issue, with the headline “Changes.”