In August 1970, Janice Joplain went home to Port Arthur, Texas for her 10th high school reunion. She arrived in beads and feathers and rosecoled glasses, looking, as one observer put it, like an alien. The reunion did not go the way she needed it to go. Afterward, drunk and depressed, she ended up at a nightclub.
Jerry Lee Lewis was there. He punched her in the face. He said, “If you’re going to act like a man, I’ll treat you like one.” Two months later, she was dead. This is the story of that night and what it meant. You have to understand what going home meant to Janice Jofflain. Port Arthur had not been kind to her.
She had grown up there feeling wrong in every measurable way. Wrong face, wrong interests, wrong music, wrong energy. She had been voted ugliest man on campus at UT Austin. She had been, in her own words, laughed out of class, out of town, and out of the state. But by August 1970, the state had changed its calculation.
She was Janice Joplain. Cheap Thrills had gone to number one. She had stopped the world at Mterrey. She had performed at Woodstock in front of half a million people. Pearl, the best music of her life, was being recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. She was the most famous female rock singer in America and she was going home for her 10th high school reunion.
The specific desire that drove this decision is not hard to understand. She wanted them to see it. The people who had laughed her out. The classmates who had voted her ugly. The town that had decided she was the wrong kind of person. She wanted to walk in and have them understand that they had been wrong.
She appeared on the Dick Cavitt show before the reunion and made a joke about it. She said, “They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state. So, I’m going home.” The audience laughed. She laughed, but she meant it. The reunion was not a triumph. She arrived exactly as she was, feathers in her hair, rosecoled glasses, the full Janice Joplain armor.
She was not going to dress down for Port Arthur. She was not going to pretend to be something she wasn’t just to make the reunion comfortable for people who had made her uncomfortable for years. But the room was not ready for her. This is the specific cruelty of homecomings. The place you’re returning to has not changed at the same rate you have.
Port Arthur in 1970 was still Port Arthur. The classmates were still the classmates. The social codes that had rejected her at 17 were still operative. They didn’t know how to receive her. Some tried, some were genuinely glad to see her. But the specific warmth she was looking for, the acknowledgment that we were wrong, that she was always extraordinary and we just couldn’t see it, that didn’t come.
What came instead was the specific awkwardness of people who had been part of something unkind and were not prepared to own it. She was dressed for a victory lap. The race had not been run the way she expected. She left drunk, depressed, the evening not over. Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Faraday, Louisiana in 1935. He was called the killer, not as a criticism, as a compliment, as an acknowledgment of what he did to a stage.
The ferocious energy the piano played standing up and then kicked over the wildeyed southern boy who had taken everything that rock and roll was supposed to be and cranked it past the point of comfort. By 1970, his career had been through several cycles. The original peak in the late 1950s, great balls of fire, whole lot of shaking going on, had been destroyed by the scandal of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin.
He had rebuilt himself as a country artist. He was working. He was still wild. He was still the killer. He was from Louisiana. He was in the South. He was at a nightclub. And so was Janice Joplain. two rock and roll lives that had been built on refusing to behave, on taking up too much space, on being too loud in rooms that wanted quiet.
In the same room late at night after a bad evening, the collision was almost inevitable. What happened in that Louisiana nightclub in August 1970 has been documented by Holly George Warren in her definitive Janice Joplain biography. She instigated it. This matters. She was not a bystander who got caught in something. She was drunk and depressed, and the evening had already failed her, and she went toward the confrontation the way she had always gone toward everything, directly, without calculation.
And Jerry Lee Lewis punched her in the face and said, “If you’re going to act like a man, I’ll treat you like one.” Let’s stay with that sentence. if you’re going to act like a man. What he meant by acting like a man, refusing to back down, taking up space, being aggressive, being loud, instigating what Janice Joplain had been doing her entire life, refusing to back down, taking up space, being aggressive, being loud, instigating.
The sentence was not new. It was a version of everything Port Arthur had ever said to her. It was a version of the Rolling Stone Review. It was a version of every person who had looked at the way she occupied the world and decided she was doing it wrong. Jerry Lee Lewis said it with his fist. But he was not the first to say it. He was just the last.
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I want to ask you something. She instigated that fight. She went toward it. Was that self-destruction or was it the same thing that made her who she was on stage? the refusal to protect herself, the complete absence of self-preservation, the total commitment. Tell me in the comments because I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I don’t have a clean answer.
August 1970 was 2 months before her death. In those two months, the Pearl Sessions continued producing the best work of her career. Me and Bobby McGee was recorded in one take. MercedesBenz was recorded in one take, ac capella. The Harvard Stadium show, her last major concert happened. The Festival Express had already happened.
The Dick Cavitt interview had already happened. The reunion, the nightclub, the punch. And then 4 days before she died, the Howard Smith interview where she said, “It really hurts if someone doesn’t like me.” She was carrying all of it. The Rolling Stone wound. The reunion that didn’t heal the original wound. the punch that was a physical version of everything she had been told her whole life.
And she kept going. She kept recording. She kept being exactly who she was. That is the thing that gets lost in the tragic version of her story. The version where she was only the doomed icon, the casualty, the cautionary tale. She kept going. After every blow, literal and figurative. She kept going. The reunion failed. She kept going.
Jerry Lee Lewis punched her in the face. She kept going. Rolling Stone called her a She kept going. She was making the best music of her life in October 1970. Right up to the end. The punches didn’t stop her. Nothing stopped her. The only thing that stopped her was the accident that happened on October 4th.
Jerry Lee Lewis went on to have a long life and a complicated legacy. He died on October 28th, 2022. He was 87 years old. He outlived Janice Joplain by 52 years. In the years after the nightclub incident, the story was not widely known. It appeared in Holly George Warren’s 2019 biography, the most comprehensive account of Janice Joplain’s life yet written.
It is possible that Jerry Lee Lewis never thought much about it afterward. It was one night in a long life full of nights. But the sentence stays, if you’re going to act like a man, I’ll treat you like one. The logic underneath it. There is a way women are supposed to occupy the world.
There is a way they are supposed to fight and it is not like this. There is a way they are supposed to exist in a southern nightclub and it is not like this. If you insist on doing it differently, you have forfeited the protection that comes with behaving correctly. This is what Port Arthur said to her. This is what the Rolling Stone reviewer said to her.
This is what the UT Austin fraternity said to her when they voted her ugliest man on campus. Always the same sentence in different forms. You are doing it wrong. She never agreed. Not at 19, not at 27, not on any night in between. The Port Arthur reunion of August 1970 has become one of the well-known stories of Janice Joplain’s last months.
The Jerry Lee Lewis fight that followed it has not. George Warren documented it. The historians know it, but it is not in the documentaries, not in the standard telling of the story. Maybe because it’s uncomfortable. She instigated it. She was drunk and depressed. It doesn’t fit the clean version of her as pure victim or pure legend.
But it fits the real version. The real version was a woman who had been told her entire life that she was taking up the wrong kind of space and who responded to that verdict consistently by taking up more of it. The real version ended the way it ended, but not before she went home and stood in the room of the people who had laughed her out, and not before she walked toward the confrontation in the nightclub the way she walked toward every confrontation.
And not before she recorded Pearl and not before she said, “You are what you settle for.” She never settled. Subscribe because this channel finds the stories that the legend leaves out. The real ones. The ones that tell you who these people actually were. She was all of it. The voice that stopped the world.
The woman who went home to prove something. The person who walked toward the punch instead of away from it. All of it Janice. All of it pearl.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
