September 18th, 1970. Sunset Sound Recording Studio, Los Angeles. Janis Joplin was in the middle of the Pearl sessions. The album was almost done. Me and Bobby McGee was tracked, Cry Baby was tracked, Mercedes Benz was still coming. That was a few weeks away. The Full Tilt Boogie Band was the best musical situation she had ever been in.
Everything pointed forward. Then someone came to the studio door. Jimi Hendrix was dead. He had died that morning in London. He was 27 years old. She left the studio. She did not go back that day. 16 days later, October 4th, 1970. Janis Joplin died in Los Angeles. She was 27 years old. 16 days. This is the story of what was between them and what those 16 days meant. June 16, 18, 1967.
Monterey Pop Festival, California. Jimi Hendrix performed on Saturday night. He was the closing act. He played his guitar with his teeth. He played it behind his back. He knelt down and poured lighter fluid on it and set it on fire. The audience at Monterey had already seen Otis Redding and The Who and Simon and Garfunkel that weekend and none of them had seen anything like what Jimi Hendrix did on Saturday night.
Janis Joplin performed on Sunday afternoon. She was an unknown from San Francisco. She sang Ball and Chain and stopped the world. Mama Cass was in the audience with her jaw on the floor. The career that would make her the most famous female rock singer in America began that Sunday afternoon.
Backstage at Monterey, in the spaces between performances, in the corridors and dressing areas and the specific informal atmosphere of a festival that was still figuring out what it was, they found each other. Two 24-year-olds, both from places that hadn’t known what to do with them. Both using an instrument, his guitar, her voice, as the thing that the wound spoke through.
Both operating at a level of commitment and rawness that nobody in their circles had encountered before. People who were there describe their energy together as immediate and recognizing. The specific ease of two people who rarely find peers and have just found one. They were in the same world for the next 3 years.
Not close in the way of people who see each other constantly. Their paths crossed rather than ran parallel. But when they were in the same room, something specific happened. Jimi Hendrix was born November 27th, 1942 in Seattle, Washington. He grew up in poverty with an absent mother and a father who was often away.
He taught himself guitar. He played the chitlin circuit. He went to London in 1966 and became what he was going to become. The specific thing Jimi Hendrix did with a guitar was unprecedented and remains unrepeated. He found sounds inside the instrument that nobody had found before him.
Not because the sounds weren’t there, but because nobody had looked for them with the specific combination of technical mastery and complete emotional freedom that Hendrix brought. He was simultaneously one of the most technically accomplished guitarists who ever lived and one of the most uninhibited. That combination, technical mastery and complete emotional freedom, was also what Janis Joplin had with her voice. And it was rare.
And they recognized it in each other. Jimmy was quoted saying about what Janis did, she could really wail. She had something. When she got going, you didn’t want it to stop. Those who knew both of them say he understood her the way musicians understand each other when they are operating at the same level of commitment, not the same style, not the same approach, but the same depth of investment in the thing they were doing.
April 1969, London. Janis Joplin was on her first European tour with the Cosmic Blues Band. Jimi Hendrix was based in London. He had lived there since 1966, returning periodically to America for tours. The city that had discovered him before America understood what it had. London was still his home base.
They were in the same city, the same circuit of clubs and venues and parties and the specific atmosphere of late 1960s London rock. Janis was struggling. The Cosmic Blues Band was not finding what Big Brother had. The reviews were mixed. She had left the only band that had ever felt like home and the new situation was not giving her what she had been promised.
Jimmy was struggling in different ways. The Electric Ladyland album had just come out to mixed reviews. The critics who had championed him turning on the ambition, the length, the difficulty. He was dealing with management issues and legal issues and the specific weight of being the most famous rock musician in the world at 26 years old.
Two people at the top of their fields both discovering that the top was not what they had imagined. Finding each other in a European city in the spring of 1969, what they shared beyond the music was this. Both of them came from places that had not wanted them. Jimmy from the poverty and chaos of Seattle, Janis from the cruelty and rejection of Port Arthur.
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Both of them had found in music the one place where the wound could be transformed into something other people needed. Both of them used instrument, his guitar, her voice, not as a tool for performing emotion, but as the thing the emotion actually was. There was no metaphor. The sound was the feeling.
The feeling was the sound, and both of them were in the same specific way burning the instrument from the inside. The voice that gave everything every time was destroying itself. The playing that went to the edge of the instrument and beyond was costing something that could not be replaced. Both of them knew this.
Neither of them stopped because stopping was not possible. The instrument and the wound in the sound were the same thing. You could not separate them without stopping all of it. September 18th, 1970, Jimi Hendrix died in London. The precise circumstances were complicated and have been analyzed for 50 years.
He was 27 years old. He had 6 weeks left on the recording sessions for what would have been his next album. He had just performed at the Isle of Wight Festival. He had plans. Janis Joplin was at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles recording Pearl. When she heard the news, she left the studio.
John Cooke, her road manager, was with her that day. He described her reaction as quiet and total. Not dramatic grief, but the specific stillness of someone receiving news that has confirmed something they had been holding at a distance. She knew what it meant. Not just what it meant for Jimmy, she knew what it meant for all of them.
For everyone in that world who was living the way they were living and giving what they were giving and not stopping. She left the studio. She was not ready to go back. 16 days later, October 4th, 1970, Janis Joplin was found in room 105 of the Landmark Motor Hotel. She was 27 years old.
Pearl was released 4 months later. It went to number one. It is still considered one of the greatest albums ever made. Jimi Hendrix’s estate released the recordings he had been working on. They have been releasing them, reworking them, presenting them in various forms for 50 years. 16 days between them. At Woodstock the previous year, August 1969, both had performed.
Janis on Saturday night at 2:00 in the morning for 400,000 people. Jimmy closing the festival Monday morning as the sun came up. Both of them at the same festival, the largest gathering of human beings at a concert in American history, performing within 12 hours of each other. Janis watched Jimmy’s sunrise set from Joe Cocker’s van.
She has been described as completely transfixed. He played Star-Spangled Banner as the sun came up. She was in the van watching. 1 year and 16 days later, they were both gone. Here is what this story asks you. When you lose someone who understood you in a specific way, someone who had the same relationship to their work that you have to yours, who saw in you what you saw in them, what do you do with the days between that loss and whatever comes next? Janis Joplin heard that Jimi Hendrix was dead.
She left the studio. She had 16 days. She spent them finishing Pearl. She recorded Mercedes Benz 3 days before she died. One take a cappella, alone in a booth. She went to the Hungry Eye and watched Tina Turner every night for a week. She made plans for the next tour. She did not stop.
She did what she always did. She filled the air with sound. Maybe she understood, somewhere she couldn’t quite look at directly, that the air needed to be filled now more than ever. That the world had just lost one of the only other people who knew how to fill it the way she did. And that it was her job, while she still could, to keep going.
16 days, she used every one of them. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
