Janis Joplin
1970: January 1970 to October 1970

At the time of the June 1970 interview with Dalton, she had already performed in the Bay Area for what turned out to be the last time. Sam Andrew, the lead guitarist who had left Big Brother with Joplin in December 1968 to form her back-up band, quit in late summer 1969 and returned to Big Brother. At the end of the year, the Kozmic Blues Band broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was the one at Madison Square Garden with Winter and Butterfield.

In February 1970, Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites), who had designed Janis's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969.

In Brazil, Joplin was romanced by a fellow American tourist named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. A Joplin biography written by her sister Laura said, "David was an upper-middle-class Cincinnati kid who had studied communications at Notre Dame.... had joined the Peace Corps after college and worked in a small village in Turkey.... He tried law school, but when he met Janis he was taking time off."

Niehaus and Joplin were photographed by the press at Rio Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Gravenites also took color photographs of the two during their Brazilian vacation. According to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn, in Gravenites' snapshots they "look like a carefree, happy, healthy young couple having a tremendously good time."

Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Joplin during an international phone call, quoting her: "I'm going into the jungle with a big bear of a beatnik named David Niehaus. I finally remembered I don't have to be on stage twelve months a year. I've decided to go and dig some other jungles for a couple of weeks." Amburn added in 1992, "Janis was trying to kick heroin in Brazil, and one of the nicest things about David was that he wasn't into drugs."

When Joplin returned to the U.S., she began using heroin again. Her relationship with Niehaus soon ended because he witnessed her shooting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California. The relationship was also complicated by her ongoing romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta, who also was an intravenous addict, and Joplin's refusal to take some time off and travel the world with him.

Around this time, she formed her new band, known for a short time as Main Squeeze, then renamed the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The band comprised mostly young Canadian musicians previously associated with Ronnie Hawkins and featured an organ, but no horn section. Joplin took a more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie band than she had with her prior group. She was quoted as saying, "It's my band. Finally it's my band!" In May 1970, after performing under the name Main Squeeze at a Hells Angels event, the renamed Full Tilt Boogie Band began a nationwide tour. Joplin became very happy with her new group, which eventually received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics.

Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, on April 4, 1970. Recordings from this concert were included on Joplin in Concert released posthumously in 1972. She again appeared with Big Brother on April 12 at Winterland, where she and Big Brother were reported to be in excellent form. She performed with the band, billed as Main Squeeze, at a party for the Hells Angels at a venue in San Rafael, California on May 21, 1970, according to a web site maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew. Andrew's web site quotes him as saying, "This will be the first time that Janis' old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge."

According to Joplin's biographer Ellis Amburn, Big Brother with its lead singer Nick Gravenites was the opening act at the party that was attended by 2,300 people. The Hells Angels, who had known Joplin since 1966, paid her a fee of $240 to perform. Gravenites and Sam Andrew (who had resumed playing guitar with Big Brother) differed in their opinions of her performance and how substance abuse affected it. Gravenites described her singing as "stupendous," according to Amburn. Amburn quoted Andrew twenty years later: "She was visibly deteriorating and she looked bloated. She was like a parody of what she was at her best. I put it down to her drinking too much and I felt a tinge of fear for her well-being. Her singing was real flabby, no edge at all."

Shortly thereafter, Joplin began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair. (She had not worn them at the May 21 Hells Angels party/concert in San Rafael). By the time she began touring with Full Tilt Boogie, Joplin told people she was drug-free, but her drinking increased.

From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Joplin jammed with the other performers on the train, and her performances on this tour are considered to be among her greatest.

Joplin headlined the festival on all three nights. At the last stop in Calgary, she took to the stage with Jerry Garcia while her band was tuning up. Film footage shows her telling the audience how great the tour was and shows her and Garcia presenting the organizers with a case of tequila. She then burst into a two-hour set, starting with " Tell Mama ". Throughout this performance, Joplin engaged in several banters about her love life. In one, she reminisced about living in a San Francisco apartment and competing with a female neighbor in flirting with men on the street. She finished the Calgary concert with long versions of "Get It While You Can" and "Ball and Chain".

Footage of her performance of "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s, and the audio from the same film footage was included on the Farewell Song (1982) album. The audio of other Festival Express performances was included on Joplin's In Concert (1972) album. Video of the performances was also included on the Festival Express DVD.

In the "Tell Mama" video shown on MTV in the 1980s, Joplin wore a psychedelically colored, loose-fitting costume and feathers in her hair. This was her standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970. She chose the new costumes after her friend and designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in Vogue ' s profile of her in its May 1968 edition), cut ties with Joplin shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.

Among Joplin's last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show. In her June 25, 1970, appearance, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state" (during the year she had spent at the University of Texas at Austin, Joplin had been voted "Ugliest Man on Campus" by frat boys). In the subsequent Cavett Show broadcast, on August 3, 1970, and featuring Gloria Swanson, Joplin discussed her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, three days later.

On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union.

On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith —was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. The following day, the Associated Press circulated this news, and the August 9 edition of The New York Times carried it. The lead paragraph of the AP story said Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, the two women never met. Joplin had been at home in Larkspur, California when she had received a long-distance phone call with an explanation of the need to finance a gravestone for Bessie Smith, whom Joplin had frequently cited as a musical influence. Joplin immediately wrote a check and mailed it to the name and address provided by the phone caller.

On August 8, 1970, as the Associated Press circulated the news about Smith's new gravestone, Joplin performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. It was there that she first performed " Mercedes Benz ", a song partially inspired by a Michael McClure poem, that she had composed with fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth a very short time earlier. According to Myra Friedman's account, Joplin performed two shows at the Capitol Theatre, the first of which was attended by actors Geraldine Page and her husband Rip Torn. Between the shows, at a "gin mill" close to this concert venue, Joplin and Neuwirth penned the lyrics to the song and she performed it at the second show, according to Friedman.

Neuwirth was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in 2015: "Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s." While in Vahsen's, "Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round."

Joplin's last public performance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. The Harvard Crimson gave the performance a positive, front-page review, despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had performed with makeshift amplifiers after their regular sound equipment was stolen in Boston.

Joplin attended her high school reunion on August 14, accompanied by Neuwirth, road manager John Cooke, and sister Laura, but it was reportedly an unhappy experience for her. Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit. When asked by a reporter if she ever entertained at Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there, Joplin replied, "Only when I walked down the aisles." Joplin denigrated Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier.

During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was enough usable material to compile an LP.

The posthumous Pearl (1971) became the biggest-selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster 's " Me and Bobby McGee " (Kristofferson had previously been one of Joplin's lovers). The opening track, "Move Over", was written by Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships. Also included was the social commentary of "Mercedes Benz", presented in an a cappella arrangement; the track on the album features the only take that Joplin recorded. A cover of Nick Gravenites 's "Buried Alive in the Blues", to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead, was included as an instrumental.

Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She and Morgan were engaged to be married in early September, although he visited Sunset Sound Recorders for just eight of Joplin's many rehearsals and sessions.

Morgan later told biographer Myra Friedman that, as a non-musician, he had felt excluded whenever he had visited Sunset Sound Recorders. Instead, he stayed at Joplin's Larkspur home while she stayed alone at the Landmark, although several times she visited Larkspur to be with him and to check the progress of renovations she was having done on the house. She told her construction crew to design a carport to be shaped like a flying saucer, according to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died.

Peggy Caserta claimed in her book, Going Down With Janis (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant and owner of Mnasidika, one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users.

For approximately the first two weeks of Joplin's stay at the Landmark, she did not know Caserta was in Los Angeles. Joplin learned of Caserta's presence at the Landmark from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there. Joplin begged Caserta for heroin, and when Caserta refused to provide it, Joplin reportedly admonished her by saying, "Don't think if you can get it, I can't get it." Joplin's publicist Myra Friedman was unaware during Joplin's lifetime that this had happened. Later, while Friedman was working on her book Buried Alive, she determined that the time frame of the Joplin-Caserta encounter was one week before Jimi Hendrix's death.

Within a few days, Joplin became a regular customer of the same heroin dealer who had been supplying Caserta.

Joplin's manager Albert Grossman and his assistant/publicist Friedman had staged an intervention with Joplin the previous winter while Joplin was in New York. In September 1970, Grossman and Friedman, who worked out of a New York office, knew Joplin was staying at a Los Angeles hotel, but were unaware it was a haven for drug users and dealers.

Grossman and Friedman knew during Joplin's lifetime that her friend Caserta, whom Friedman met during the New York sessions for Cheap Thrills and on later occasions, used heroin. During the many long-distance telephone conversations that Joplin and Friedman had in September 1970 and on October 1, Joplin never mentioned Caserta, and Friedman assumed Caserta had been out of Joplin's life for a while. Friedman, who had more time than Grossman to monitor the situation, never visited California. She thought Joplin sounded on the phone like she was less depressed than she had been over the summer.

When Joplin was not at Sunset Sound Recorders, she liked to drive her Porsche over the speed limit "on the winding part of Sunset Blvd.", according to a statement made by her attorney Robert Gordon in 1995 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Friedman wrote that the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, Ken Pearson, often hesitated to join her, though he did on the night she died. He was not interested in using hard drugs.

On September 26, 1970, Joplin recorded vocals for "Half Moon" and " Cry Baby ". The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon. Joplin was among several singers who had been contacted by Yoko Ono with a request for a taped greeting for Lennon's 30th birthday, on October 9. Joplin, Pearson, and Pierson chose the Dale Evans composition " Happy Trails " as part of the greeting. Lennon told Dick Cavett on-camera the following year that Joplin's recorded birthday wishes arrived at his home after her death.

On October 1, 1970, Joplin completed her last recording, "Mercedes Benz", which was recorded in a single take. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites 's song "Buried Alive in the Blues", which the band had recorded earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day.

At some point on Saturday, she learned by telephone, to her dismay, that Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant, invited them to her home, and was shooting pool with them using her pool table. People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Joplin expressing anger about the state of her relationship with Morgan, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions.

Joplin and Ken Pearson later left the studio together and she drove him in her Porsche to the West Hollywood landmark called Barney's Beanery. Friedman wrote, "At the bar, she drank vodka and orange juice, only two." Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman, was present at Barney's Beanery, according to what he told John Byrne Cooke immediately after he (Glotzer) learned of her death. Evidently, Joplin had a friendly conversation with a young man whom she did not know, and he expressed admiration for her music.

After midnight, she drove Ken Pearson and the male fan to the Landmark where she and Pearson were staying in separate rooms. During the car ride, the fan asked Joplin questions "about her singing style," according to Friedman, and "she mostly ignored him" so she could converse with Pearson. As Joplin and Pearson prepared to part in the lobby of the Landmark, she expressed a fear, possibly in jest, that he and the other Full Tilt Boogie musicians might decide to stop making music with her. Pearson was the second-to-last person to see her alive. The last was the Landmark's night shift desk clerk. He had met her several times but did not know her.
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