I’ve been talking to people about women who inspire them. The conversations transcribed are more or less verbatim. Do drop me a line if you would like to sing the praises of a woman deserving of recognition.
Inspiration to Dannie-Lu Carr
Tell me a little bit about Janis Joplin, and what it is about her that resonates with you.
She broke the mould in so many different ways.
She became a massive blues singer, was not perceived as pretty, she had real insecurities about how she looked. One of the guys in her first band said that someone they knew said to them, “I’ve got his friend, she can really sing, d’you want to meet her?” And they all had this fantasy of this stunning woman, and then Janis turned up to audition, and of course she wasn’t this stunning woman, but she was so sexy and beautiful, just in a completely different way…
She used her voice so amazingly, and the way that she connected on stage, the way she got everything in, without apology, was just.. incredible… her voice has always resonated with me for that… and I think it’s that… I think it’s the fact that she was this little woman – that I obviously relate to, I’m a little woman – and she had this big voice, and she was fearless, and was like.. holding her own in a man’s world, I mean, she was a rock ’n roll singer, you know? And she was one of the first women to really break into that – in the late 60s, early 70s – it wasn’t a woman’s game, not the way that she sang rock and blues, no one had done it before.
I don’t actually know a huge amount about her – When did you become familiar with her work?
My sister used to listen to her a lot, and I heard her voice and, I just thought “Oh my God” and then I started to really listen, and learn a bit more about her, and the more I learned, the more I could relate to where this woman was coming from. She was really tough, but at the same time so sensitive. People she knew said that at times she could revert to this little girl who was so wounded. I get that, when people are tough, which I guess I am, we can be so sensitive as well.
Also, I guess, sometimes, as a tough woman, you are given a harder time, because people assume you can take it.
Yeah, maybe. There’s no middle ground is there? You’re either a demure feminine flower, or you’re a badass, and actually, they’re not necessarily different things.
Absolutely; it’s that same old story isn’t it, you’re either the virgin or the whore.
Totally. It’s archetypes of women. And, yeah, they exist, but we’re not just a bunch of archetypes, we’re humans. It’s dehumanising the female. Again.
So, take the stage – tell us more about Janis.
A young, Texan woman, who really didn’t ever fit into the conservative Texan lifestyle in which she was born and brought up. Felt like the small town mentality was keeping her very stuck (which I also relate to actually – where I grew up felt like that as well). She really found her rebellion. She used to get in the car with a bunch of her male friends, drive over the border into Louisiana, hang out in the blues bars, and she absolutely fell in love with the Blues.
She was always looked at as quite plain, not attractive. She was quite under developed – she just wasn’t the “popular girl” that her mother always wanted her to be. So, she found her own way, which was kind of hell raising – and she did, you know, drink hard, and do a lot of drugs, and party hard – but it was all in this quest to ultimately, be loved. She just wanted to be really loved.
She hadn’t sung before, but she got so into the blues, when she was about 18/19, that she just started singing, and then she discovered her own voice. She said it was a real surprise when she discovered that she had this amazing voice that could go through several octaves. She could sing the blues like no-one else. When you see live footage of her singing, it’s like every cell of her goes into telling that story, and the emotion that comes through is incredible. And like I say, she was one of the first women to get up there – this tiny little woman who was no sassy stereotypical beauty just got up and took the stage, and she was so real and raw… there is some brilliant footage of one of her first live gigs, where a camera pans the audience and they’re all looking at her, open mouthed. Even Cass Elliot – she was in the audience, and she just looks stunned – that’s how amazing it was.
Janis was in several bands during her short career, but ‘Big Brother and the Holding Company’ was her first, and they were brilliant, there was no holding back from any of the musicians – they all just took their particular instrument and went for it – she went there with her voice and it was just… this genius that came out of that. But she was such a restless soul, so she then moved on, ‘The Kozmic Blues Band’ was next, which initially got panned, and as a result, she really dipped, that was when she got really into heroine.
She had been into speed and other drugs before that… the story was that she left university in Texas after a campus competition, where frat houses would nominate one of their members as the “ugliest man on campus”, and somebody nominated her – apparently it absolutely destroyed her, and she was completely in pieces afterwards. That was when she went to San Francisco where she started to find herself, but she did also get into speed – probably for the numbing effect. She had never felt attractive enough, or that she belonged … as much as she was this genius on stage, she was also very, very self-destructive. They used to say that if there was a room of people partying, she would always go the hardest – she would drink the most, she would take the most drugs – it was like she was on this mission – so when she left college she had got into speed, and after ‘The Kozmic Blues Band’ got panned, that was, I think, when she started to get into the heroine – but she did have a real roller coaster and ‘The Full Tilt Boogie Band’, that she formed next, did amazingly, and actually, as is really typical, when she died, the album they were working on became one of the best selling albums – she had really hit her high point.
She was so restless, and so driven by music… she so badly wanted to do amazingly well that she ended up in self-destruct land. And I think when you get someone who shoots to fame, so young, and then you have the super-critical media surrounding them – and you know – we know, as creative people that when you work hard on something, and then you put it out there – it’s so vulnerable a place to be – Janis had a tricky childhood, and when you’ve got childhood trauma in that mix it’s almost a given…
That’s the thing, isn’t it – when you create something, you are opening yourself up, and showing people – “this is the ugly part of me – this is me at my ugliest” – pain is not an attractive thing, it’s something that most people in “polite society” hide, whereas with art, in it’s various forms, often you are saying to people – you’re showing them “this is what it feels like”, so to then have that, not only criticised, but also swept aside – because if people are saying that she is ugly, that is what they are doing – to think of what she is putting out there and sharing with people, and for then then to dismiss all of that and reduce her down to her physical appearance, and not only reduce her to that, but also to attack her for it…
Yeah. And despite the fact that she was obviously suffering through all of that, she still found the guts to get on that stage and just rip into that microphone – even when she was feeling awful about herself, she still did that unapologetically.
The way it all ended for her was so sad – she was in the middle of making that last album, ‘Pearl’, which is a beautiful album, and she had found happiness with the author Seth Morgan. They were engaged and she had been phoning round venues to get them married, and she wanted to have the kids – she wanted to do that whole thing, and then, while Pearl was being engineered, she got restless. She’d come off heroine – she’d got clean, but for some reason she decided that she was going to do a hit… She didn’t turn up for recording the next day – and apparently she was ALWAYS on time, and one of the band called the road manager who then found her… and that was yeah – 27 years old… it was mid-Autumn, I think. October.
When they carried out the autopsy they found that it had been 40% pure heroine, as opposed to the 3% cut it would normally have been – something I only found out recently, was that there were 9 other cases in LA that night of people who had died from that percentage of heroine…
People say, “she’d dead, but she’s not” because her music is so present still.
All you have are 5 words to describe Janis. What are they?
It’s so hard! Brave, Dynamic, Sassy, Vibrant, Sensitive.
So how could we all be a little more Janis to help make the world a better place?
By being more defiant – and not letting people knock us down – regardless of the hurt we experience – I mean we’re going to feel it, of course, but we should still stick to our path, and get up there and speak up. That is a massive passion of mine. And by being yourself, without bending to the bloody judgments on women, which I can’t believe is still a thing…I know we tend to care a bit less as we get older, but I do still look at the younger generation and think, “stop doing this to the females, it’s awful” It’s the male gaze, isn’t it – which isn’t necessarily the “male gaze”, because a lot of men don’t feel like that, but it’s the gaze that’s sold to us through patriarchal capitalism – it’s the nubility and infantilisation of women.
And if everyone who reads this has got five minutes now, and they want to listen to just one song to find out why you’re so passionate about her?
If they have to listen to just one song… I think it’s got to be ‘Piece of my Heart’.
This post was originally published as ‘”Backwards in High Heels”
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