SCARS OF SWEET PARADISE

A smart, sober reappraisal of Janis Joplin’s whirlwind life and the hippie moment. Having interviewed scores of Joplin’s intimates, rock critic and historian Echols (Daring to Be Bad, not reviewed) persuades us that the received image of Joplin as a wild, doomed, drunken howler—memorialized in several previous biographies and in the movie The Rose—is wrong only in that it emphasizes Joplin’s iconic extremity of style at the expense of personal and cultural context. In the bleak refinery town of Port Arthur, Tex., Joplin was rejected by her high school and college peers for her ungainly looks and intellectual curiosity; she responded by developing a boisterous beatnik persona, drinking and listening to folk, jazz, and blues with other rebels. Joplin won praise singing at coffeehouses in Austin; made a few forays to San Francisco and New York, where she lived precariously and started taking speed and heroin; and finally, after an unsatisfying year-long attempt at conforming to bun-haired Port Arthur primness, moved again to San Francisco in 1966 as the acid-fueled counterculture was approaching full flower. Joplin joined and galvanized Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of the many semicompetent Haight-Ashbury bands devoted to meandering, out-of-tune jamming. Echols gives a thorough, bracingly unsentimental overview of the scene’s muddleheaded idealism and its rapid commodification and demise. Joplin shot to fame with her histrionic, gut- spilling performances, but mass adoration did not fill her “bottomless pit of neediness—: “No high could compete with her lows, with her conviction that she was worthless.” Her heroin addiction, alcoholism, and tumultuous sexual relationships (with both men and women) were all related to that insecurity, says Echols, but were by no means unique in the curdled post-1967 counterculture. What’s lacking here is Joplin’s music: while Echols’s is a convincing psychological and sociological portrait, we come away with little sense of the substance or quality of her records. (40 b&w photos, not seen)