MUSIC: Rock of Ages: Forty years after their deaths, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin now

seem part of the mainstream culture they rebelled against

Author(s): WENDY SMITH
Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Autumn 2010), pp. 89-92
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41222259
Accessed: 08-05-2020 01:03 UTC

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 89

ARTS

Music

Rock of Ages
Forty years after their deaths, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin now
seem part of the mainstream culture they rebelled against
WENDY SMITH

I was 14 when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin

path to ecstasy, ha
died within 16 days of each other.tion of
It was 40 years conventi
behavior,
ago, the faH of 1970, hardly more than three years and con
since the Monterey Pop Festival the
had madefirst
them member
high
both stars, but as far as my friends school
and I were of he
concerned, they'd always beendiedaround. They
young: Lenn
John
were part of our musical landscape, along withGarfield,
the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joplin
and Bob Dylan. introduced
she
Drugs, I regret to say, were part of always
our landscape cited
though
too; we bought into the counterculture's glorifi- I didn't
cation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n'Empress
roll as the way of the B
to blast our generation loose from14, to
the dead my
hand mother'
of what
of conformity and the dreaded prospect of turn- a woman
teenage
ing into our parents. We shrugged off adult fin- girl who
flamboyant
ger wagging over the deaths of two 27-year-olds count
from heroin overdose and suffocation due to bar-
talent and audacit
I loved
biturate intoxication (though Hendrix choking Hendrix's
was
on his own vomit inspired a fair amount merely
of gross- the
field
out teen humor). When you're 14, of
27 seems far rock-guit
to romanti-
away, and premature death can seem my soul. "Bal
Heart,"
cally tragic rather than criminally wasteful. "Kozmic
I accepted that grown woman, bu
adolescent angst. I
Wendy Smith, acontribut-
a friend who dec
ing editor o/The American
Scholar, lives sing
in Summertime
Brooklyn. pursu

Rock of Ages

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 90

was the guy who wrote it," I shot back- one of ent, both personally, in the drug-related nerv-
the few times in my teens that I actually made ous breakdowns of several of my friends, and
the right rejoinder on the spot. When a class- politically, in newspaper headlines about Black
mate asserted that Hendrix's death was a Panthers killed in police raids and Weather
greater loss to music than Joplin's, I resented
Underground members blowing themselves up
or perpetrating lunatic bank robberies. At the
the implication that she was just a chick singer,
while he was a serious musician. ripe-old age of 18, 1 felt as unmoored as the exis-
tentialists I was reading. Sanity and a sense of
I have to admit, though, that when I started
listening to Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, for
limits were beginning to seem a lot more appeal-
ing than ecstasy and excess. The music I pre-
awhile it made me thinkless of Joplin. "I don't
like her as much now that I've heard the real ferred in college was by singer-songwriters
thing," I remember loftily telling someone,
(including Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman),
betraying a misguided notion of authenticity
whose work had the honesty of Hendrix's and
that confines purists in every field. Hendrix,
Joplin's, with less recklessness. If they took
whose weakness for self- drugs (and plenty of
indulgent solos was more them did), they didn't
noticeable in the mate- promote LSD as a path
rial his record company to enlightenment. Their
issued posthumously, diminished sense of pos-
also suffered by compar- sibility made me a little
ison when I encountered sad- Joplin and Hen-
the stinging, tightly drix, especially in per-
focused work of Muddy formance, always gave
Waters, Robert Johnson, me the feeling that mu-
and other classic blues sic could do anything
and take you anywhere- but their caution
guitarists. I didn't know that Hendrix had care-
seemed wise. Smashing through sexual, social,
fully studied them all, and I didn't really hear
the bluesy cadences that informed even and
his political restraints could be liberating, but
most psychedelic songs. Similarly, I was star-
it was also risky, sometimes life threatening.
tled by the country twang of "Me and BobbyI learned that lesson over and over as an
McGee" and "Mercedes Benz" on Joplin's final
undergraduate studying revolutionary move-
album, released after her death. All I'd ever
ments and radical dissent. I was still a child of
heard about her youth in Texas was that she
the '60s, trying to find a way to make sense of
hated every minute of it, and I'd assumed that
the cultural and political turbulence that unset-
tled my adolescence. Being bookish by nature,
included the region's music as well as the jocks
and sorority girls who mocked her. I had
I thought that finding precedents in history
thought of Hendrix and Joplin as fabulously
would help me do it. And eventually it did, after
new creatures who had invented themselves depressing sojourns through European revolu-
and their music. I wasn't entirely wrong, tions
but that ended either with the restoration of
the monarchy and an oppressive class structure ft
they had connections to the past that were more
tenacious than I realized. that took hundreds more years to reform (Eng- |
land and France) or with a police state arguably £
I would be a lot older when I figured that out.
worse than what preceded it (the Soviet Union). S
I wasn't listening to their records much by the
time I finished high school in 1974. I'd pretty
The collapse of the Utopian dreams of the '60s |
well had it with the whole '60s thing. The con-
appeared less toxic in that context, the conser- ^
vative reaction of the '80s- though still trou- '
sequences of its extremism were grimly appar-

The American Scholar, Autumn 2010

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 91

bling to a very liberal Democrat like me- less country and jazz as well as folk and blues. They
final. It had all happened before. prompted me to listen more closely to older
I was especially fond of two previous eras in music by artists I knew mostly by reputation:
American history that intertwined personal, Elvis Presley, The Coasters, Ray Charles, Sam
political, and cultural transformations. The Cooke, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Louis Jordan,
transcendentalists, staunch abolitionists all, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Louis Arm-
blithely appropriated bits of Swedenborgian strong, George Gershwin. On their recordings
mysticism, German idealist philosophy, and I heard people refusing to be confined by gen-
English romanticism to create the first great res, mixing up traditions, picking up the pieces
flowering of our national literature in the works that were meaningful to them and discarding
of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, the ones that didn't suit- just like Emerson or
and Dickinson- as well as a lot of messy per- O'Neill. American music was part of a larger
sonal entanglements and at least one failed story about the American character.
commune. In the early 20th century, Green- With this in mind, I could see that Joplin
wich Village rebels mingled Marxist theory, and Hendrix were more than fabulous hippie
modernist aesthetics, and Freudian psychology icons, the counterculture that embraced them
to preach socialist revolution, free verse, and more than a historical anomaly. Snippets of
free love, outraging the bourgeoisie at least as their biographies that I'd known for years fit
thoroughly as any tie-dyed hippie while giving together in a new pattern.
rise to the Provincetown Players, Eugene Hendrix had famously played backup for a
O'Neill, and The Masses, a trenchantly radical variety of great African-American singers on
magazine with equally trenchant art. the chitlin' circuit, the string of venues that
stretched from black theaters in Northern cities
down to the barbecue joints of the deep South.
None of this necessarily hadanything Just as famously, he'd been fired by Solomon
Burke, Otis Redding, and Little Richard, who
to do with music, except that my first job after
weren't about to be upstaged by some wild kid
graduation was at Doubleday, which published
Dave Marsh's biography of Bruce Springsteenplaying behind his back, picking the strings with
his teeth, and humping the guitar. When Hen-
while I was there. Until then I hadn't read any
books about rock 'n' roll- I was immersed in drix hit New York in 1964, Harlem sophisticates
were equally unwelcoming to a performer who
history tomes and 19th-century novels, and I'm
not sure I knew that there were books on the curled his hair, wore a woman's blouse and a
subject. But I was a Springsteen fan, picked up bolero hat onstage, and inserted rock solos into
the book, and was hooked as soon as I read theblues classics. Hendrix didn't fit in. He'd grown
words, "I believe rock 'n' roll has saved lives." up in Seattle, attended integrated schools,
Fm always susceptible to a writer with passion,played guitar in various groups that mixed up
and Marsh's insistence that culture has politi- blues, R & B, rock 'n' roll, and jazz for multiracial
cal implications jibed with the convictions I'd crowds. He revered Dylan's Blonde on Blonde
developed studying history. I started to read album as a work of genius and was writing songs
more seriously about popular music and dis-in that freeform vein. It made sense that he
covered many intelligent critics who astutely finally found his audience downtown in Green-
placed it within a social framework. Marsh,wich Village, where denizens of the Cafe Wha
Peter Guralnick, and Greil Marcus (my three were wowed by the uniquely personal style he
favorites) situated rock 'n' roll on a continuum called "science fiction rock 'n' roll."
that stretched back to Stephen Foster and slaves' Meanwhile, the musical heritage that Hen-
field hollers before the Civil War and included drix found confining helped Joplin free herself

Rock of Ages

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 92

from Southern gentility. She defied her segre- between men and women. Joplin's rendering is
gated hometown by playing the records of an outraged protest, with the word "Why?"
African-American folk and blues artists; listen- stretched to the breaking point. She stomps her
ing to Leadbelly, Odetta, and, most of all, Bessie feet, throws back her arms and howls, "This can't
Smith, she realized that singing could express be- b-b-b-b-b-b-b-be-be-be- in vain!" In a shot
the ferocious emotions that Port Arthur insisted of a dumfounded Cass Elliot, Mama Cass mouths
she suppress. But the folk-music scene in 1963 the words, "Oh wow," and for once they're not a
wasn't ready for a white woman with such a raw hippie cliché.
sound; Joplin had to wait a fewyears to find the The first time I saw Monterey Pop, in 1969, 1
setting her anguished, assaultive vocals needed. loved it not just because the performances were
She'd never seen a rock show or sung with an thrilling, but because it celebrated what I viewed
electric band when she arrived in San Francisco as my culture: the far-out music, the freaky
to audition for Big Brother and the Holding clothes, the militant politics of those who stood
Company in 1966, but that didn't matter to a proudly outside the mainstream. For a lot of
psychedelic group that played what one mem- years, it made me sad to watch the film, think-
ber described as "blues in Technicolor." ing of the people and hopes that had died. Now
Hendrix and Joplin came from differentit makes me happy again, because I'm older and
parts of America to cross racial and cultural I know that nothing lasts forever, which makes
those moments of joy all the more precious. I
boundaries, I realized, but they wound up in the
same place: a place where they could be them-also know that the period of radical change in
which Hendrix and Joplin flourished was not
selves. They took what they needed from all the
unique (as I once thought), that they belonged
music they loved and transformed it into some-
thing new. To their delight, they discovered thatto a tradition no less real for being eclectic and
there were a lot of other misfits out there who inclusive rather than rigid and strictly defined.

appreciated what they did.

You can see the exhilarating results in D. A.
Pennebaker's 1968 concert film Monterey Pop,A while ago, buying kalamata olives and
which captures the early prime of two artistsparmesan cheese at a Middle Eastern shop in
my neighborhood, I saw a flyer announcing a
who'd only recently figured out that they could
do it their way. Hendrix tears up the Troggs'book signing by Arthur Schwartz, author of The
"Wild Thing," layering it with feedback and dis-Southern Italian Table: Authentic Tastes from
Traditional Kitchens. A guy named Schwartz
tortion, tossing in a riff from Sinatra's "Strangers
writing a book about authentic Italian food and
in the Night," snapping his chewing gum all the
plugging it at a store run by Lebanese Chris-
while. At the climax, he straddles his guitar, pours
lighter fluid on it, sets it on fire, and smashes it.tians-that, I thought, is the American way. I
"Don't think I'm silly doing this because I don't
also thought of Hendrix playing "The Star Span-
think I'm losing my mind," he tells the crowd, thegled Banner" at Woodstock and of Joplin telling
grin of a naughty schoolboy on his face. "This isa record producer, "I want to be the greatest
blues singer in the world." There is no authen-
the only way I can do it." Backed by Big Brother's
screeching guitars and frenetic rhythms, Joplintic here: we mix and match, we savor our own
heritage and everyone else's.
is equally incendiary. The band does its "slash-
and-burn" arrangement of Big Mama Thornton's "I am large, I contain multitudes," Walt Whit-
"Ball and Chain"; Joplin shrieks and moans herman declared in "Song of Myself." So did the
way through the song with scary, intoxicatingskinny black kid who was too weird for Harlem
abandon. When Thornton sang "Ball and Chain,"and the unhappy, unpopular white girl who was
it was a worldly reckoning of the way things were way too weird for Texas. •

The American Scholar, Autumn 2010

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