There is something that happens to a musician the first time they hear themselves on the radio. Not in a studio, not on playback, not through headphones in a control room while a producer watches for a reaction. On the radio, in a car or in a kitchen or in a store, in the middle of an ordinary day, the voice coming out of a speaker that was playing other things a moment ago and is now playing you.
It has happened to every musician who has ever had a record played. It happens once in the specific way it happens the first time. After that, it is a different experience. Familiar, expected. The surprise is gone. The first time is the only time. Janice Joplain heard herself on the radio for the first time in 1968.
Cheap Thrills had just gone to number one. She was alone in her car. This is a reconstruction. This is what that felt like. Cheap Thrills was released on August 12th, 1968. It went to number one on the Billboard charts and stayed there for 8 weeks. 2 million copies. Piece of my heart on the radio in every American city. Summertime ball and chain.
The voice that had stopped 7,000 people cold at Mterrey, now coming out of car radios and kitchen radios and the speakers of every record store and every teenage bedroom in America. Janice Joplain was 25 years old. She had been performing since she was 19. She had been in San Francisco for 2 years.
She had done Mterrey. She had done the interviews and the magazine covers and the touring. She had watched the thing she was doing become the thing the world was talking about. But she had not yet heard herself on the radio. Not really. Not the way it happens. The Porsche was painted with the history of the universe.
Dave Richards, a friend and artist, had covered it in murals, a rolling work of art, the specific visual expression of Janice Joplain’s approach to everything she touched. The car was impossible to miss. It was her on four wheels. She drove it through San Francisco the way she drove through everything.
Fully present, fully herself, the performance version and the private version occupying the same space. The radio was on. The radio was always on. She was driving somewhere back to the hate or across town or nowhere in particular the way you drive when you have been inside all day and need the city around you.
The ordinary drive. And the DJ said her name. And now, Janice Joplain. Her hand tightened on the wheel. She knew what was coming. She knew the record. She had made the record. She had been in the studio when they made it. She had heard the playbacks. She knew every note. But she had not heard it like this.
The first note came out of the car speaker, her own voice from outside. She had always known her voice from the inside, from the specific internal experience of making the sound, feeling it in the chest and the throat and the body. She had heard it on tape and in studios. But there is a difference between hearing yourself in a professional context and hearing yourself come out of a car radio in the middle of a city where you are just a person driving.
A radio does not know who is listening. A radio does not adjust its output based on who is in the car. It just plays. And the voice that came out of the radio was her voice in the way that a photograph of your face is your face. Recognizable yours and also somehow not quite what you experience from inside.
She pulled over the Porsche to the curb. Engine still running, radio still playing. She could not drive and do this at the same time. Not because she was overwhelmed, though something close to overwhelmed was present, because this was a specific thing that required specific attention, and she had learned somewhere in the four years since Threadgills to pay attention to the specific things.
She sat with her hands off the wheel. Her voice came out of the car radio. On the sidewalk outside, a child walked past with a transistor radio, the same song on the child’s radio, the same voice. The child did not know that the woman in the painted car was the voice. The woman did not know the child was there.
The song connected them without either of them knowing. That is what a radio does. That is what a number one record does. It puts your voice into the air of a city where strangers are carrying it without knowing you are nearby. What did it feel like? This is the question that nobody can fully answer because nobody who was in the car has given a full account. This is a reconstruction.
The specific feeling of the first time is only fully known to the person who had it and she is gone. But we know something about what she said in interviews in the period when cheap Thrills was number one about what it was like to be famous in this way. She said in various forms that it was strange, that the voice she heard on the radio was her voice and was also a separate thing, a thing that had gone out into the world and was living a life she could not entirely control or predict.
She said once that she was not sure she liked hearing herself on the radio, not because the record was bad, because the gap between the inside of a performance and the outside of a performance, between the specific living experience of making the sound and the experience of hearing the sound come back to you from a speaker was larger than she expected.
The performance was alive when she was making it. The radio played a recording of a performance. The recording was real. The aliveness of the performance was in the past tense. She sat with that. The song ended. The DJ came back. Another record. The ordinary flow of radio. She sat for a moment in the silence after herself.
Then she started the car. She drove back into traffic. The radio played something else. The city continued to be the city. She had heard herself on the radio for the first time. It would happen again. It was already happening in every car, on every street, everywhere that Cheap Thrills was playing.
It would happen for the rest of her life and after her life, for 55 years, and still counting. But the first time had happened, and the first time is the only time. She died 2 years after that drive. She was 27 years old. Piece of My Heart is still on the radio. Summertime is still on the radio. Ball and Chain is still on the radio.
Me and Bobby McGee, which she recorded two years after hearing herself on the radio for the first time, is still on the radio. Right now, in a car somewhere in America, her voice is coming out of a speaker. A driver is listening. They do not know they are in the same position she was in, parked on the side of a San Francisco street in 1968, hearing a voice from outside that they only knew from inside. She knew it from inside.
She pulled over to hear it from outside. The song ended. She drove. Here is what this story asks you. What is the thing you have made or said or done that went out into the world and came back to you from a direction you did not expect? And what was the difference between making it and hearing it from outside? Janice Joplain’s voice went out into the world on August 12th, 1968 on a number one record and came back to her from a car radio on a San Francisco street.
She pulled over, she sat with it, the song ended, she drove, and the voice has been on the radio ever since. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
