Word: joplin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...threw back her head to sing she became a lioness. From the moment she stomped, wailed, moaned, sweated her way through Love Is Like a Ball and Chain at the Monterey pop festival in June 1967 until her death three years later from an overdose of heroin, Janis Joplin was the high priestess of rock, the only female star to become a sex symbol on the order of Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison...
...extravagance, and the foolish noise were a barren fuss embraced by barren hearts, and it was a lost child who would kick up such rubbish to gain entrance into rooms so empty." Written with a sympathetic intelligence, at times fiercely lyrical, Buried Alive is an honest book about Joplin the idol and Joplin the victim in the frantic, manic disarray of rock in the '60s. A meticulous researcher, Friedman has taken great pains to document the Joplin chronicle as exhaustively as one might document the biography of a statesman-with the result that the large cast of minor characters...
...Joplin was born in the small oil-refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, where her father was an engineer for Texaco. A docile, soft-faced child, she was a voluminous reader, and her grades were excellent. No incidents of her early childhood foreshadowed fame -or a life crudely bartered away in exchange for counterfeit thrills from drugs, sex and alcohol...
More than anything else she wanted to be pretty. But in adolescence her complexion raged and she got fat. A lifelong obsession with personal ugli ness began. Unequal to the conventional standards of Southern femininity, Joplin decided to be its antithesis: she became one of the guys-palling around with boys who drank beer, listened to jazz, and tolerated her because she was willing to play court jester...
...Joplin's career was not built through a publicity machine-Friedman did not even have publicity shots of her after her first triumphant New York appearance. Joplin created her own extravagant legend onstage. Unlike singers whose music swells in a slowly rising tide over 15 or 20 minutes, she opened the floodgates in her first two songs...