Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin was born in 1943 and, by her death in 1970 she had really made her mark as one of the greatest artists of all time - according to Rolling Stone magazine in 2004 at the very least.

Her first recording was in 1964 when she teamed up with Jorma Kaukonen to record a number of blues standards which later found their way onto the bootleg The Typewriter Tape and the collection box set Janis. By this time the drug and alcohol addictions that would finally claim her were already taking hold though she cleaned up for a short while when she enrolled at Lamar University in 1965.

In 1966 she joined Big Brother and The Holding Company and their eponymous album was released in 1967. A performance at the Monterey Music Festival in the same year won her immediate fame and by 1968 she had made her television debut. Big Brother released their second album Cheap Thrills which clung to the No.1 slot for weeks and sold over a million copies in the first month of release alone.

Joplin left Big Brother in 1968 and recruited a new backup band which she called the Kozmic Blues Band. They released Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! in 1969 but that was to be the only release, after achieving only moderate success in the shadow of the Cheap Thrills album with Big Brother. 1969 was the year that Joplin played Woodstock.

In 1970 she pulled together a new band toured with the Festival Express tour in Canada. In the September of that year she began to record Pearl, but she was dead before it was released. She never saw it achieve the best sales of her short recording career. Joplin had reveled in her own ballsy, boozy legend but its needy, inebriated, real-life equivalent was a shadow that darkened her short life and has tainted the enduring vision of what she achieved.