Janis Joplin at Monterey Pop, 1967
Roy Bentley
Janis is onstage. Sequined dress. Hair loose, flying.
The old story of bruised joy and lived life. She’s come
from a backstage day-long free-for-all of partying to sing.
Oh, sweet tramp-queen of the Unwashed and of stenches
that follow the Dead and the Living! That follow us all!
She’s chosen “Ball and Chain” and is feeling it, the song.
And in the fleshly world, where need and want are bound
to Expectation as much as to Appetite, she feeds the ones
who avail themselves of her notion of loaves and fishes.
Though she may be a vision, she’s no savior. She parties
with Hells Angels and, in the course of the song, crosses
the threshold of the house where the woman in the song,
that woman, makes a life by learning to pour out her soul.
It may occur to Janis that this is what she does: beg love
under a rare blue California sky leaped from summer and
nineteen sixty-seven. Her world devours itself, as does that
other, the one where LBJ lies we can win the war in Vietnam.
Maybe the way she consumes a song is an act of hoping.
Maybe she prays, if she still prays at all, it will transport or
change her life into a thing made precious by its unrepeatability.
Because something like this is what’s happening down front--
to Mama Cass: she’s transfixed, clearly tripping. Transported
by words Janis brands as luminous as she sings. This Janis
seems other-than-beautiful and one of us while lighting tens
of thousands of fires of recognition, of warning, and of protest,
visible as the hard truth about us registering on a sea of faces.
No doubt she’s having the time of her life, singing like this.
She gives them what they can use to fill the emptiness. Then
performs a spontaneous little happy-leap offstage, afterwards,
straight into the arms of an anonymous someone to celebrate.
Roy Bentley
Janis is onstage. Sequined dress. Hair loose, flying.
The old story of bruised joy and lived life. She’s come
from a backstage day-long free-for-all of partying to sing.
Oh, sweet tramp-queen of the Unwashed and of stenches
that follow the Dead and the Living! That follow us all!
She’s chosen “Ball and Chain” and is feeling it, the song.
And in the fleshly world, where need and want are bound
to Expectation as much as to Appetite, she feeds the ones
who avail themselves of her notion of loaves and fishes.
Though she may be a vision, she’s no savior. She parties
with Hells Angels and, in the course of the song, crosses
the threshold of the house where the woman in the song,
that woman, makes a life by learning to pour out her soul.
It may occur to Janis that this is what she does: beg love
under a rare blue California sky leaped from summer and
nineteen sixty-seven. Her world devours itself, as does that
other, the one where LBJ lies we can win the war in Vietnam.
Maybe the way she consumes a song is an act of hoping.
Maybe she prays, if she still prays at all, it will transport or
change her life into a thing made precious by its unrepeatability.
Because something like this is what’s happening down front--
to Mama Cass: she’s transfixed, clearly tripping. Transported
by words Janis brands as luminous as she sings. This Janis
seems other-than-beautiful and one of us while lighting tens
of thousands of fires of recognition, of warning, and of protest,
visible as the hard truth about us registering on a sea of faces.
No doubt she’s having the time of her life, singing like this.
She gives them what they can use to fill the emptiness. Then
performs a spontaneous little happy-leap offstage, afterwards,
straight into the arms of an anonymous someone to celebrate.
