Rolling Stone magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1967, the same year Janice Joplain became famous. The same city, the same world. Rolling Stone was supposed to be her magazine, the countercultures own publication, the place that understood what she was and why it mattered.
And then Rolling Stone published a piece that described her jewelry as making her look like a Babylonian [ __ ] She was so devastated she canceled a major interview. She couldn’t face another journalist. She finally gave that interview on September 30th, 1970, 4 days before she died. This is the story of what Rolling Stone did to Janice Joplain and what she said about it in the last days of her life.
Rolling Stone was founded by Jan Wer in November 1967, 5 months after Mterrey at the exact moment Janice Joplain was becoming the most important new voice in American rock music. The timing was not a coincidence. Both Rolling Stone and Janice Joplain were products of the same San Francisco moment, the convergence of music and culture and countercultural politics that made the hate ashberry years what they were.
In those early years, Rolling Stone covered Janice the way you’d expect. She was important, they said. So, she was reviewed, profiled, photographed. She was on covers. She was part of the story the magazine was telling about what American music was becoming. The relationship between a rock star and the magazine that defined rock criticism in that era is specific and important.
These were not just journalists and their subject. These were people who believed they were part of the same project. The music was serious. The criticism was serious. The magazine was the place where serious people said serious things about what the music meant. Janice read Rolling Stone. Of course she did.
Everyone in her world read Rolling Stone, which is exactly why what they published in the summer of 1970 hit as hard as it did. The specific piece that broke her has been discussed in various biographies and retrospectives. The detail that has been consistently documented, the detail that Janice herself referenced in her final interview, the detail that caused her to cancel the Howard Smith interview in August, was an assessment of her jewelry.
The writer described her bountiful jewelry as making her look like a Babylonian [ __ ] Take a moment with that. She had spent her entire adult life being told by Port Arthur, by Texas, by the mainstream that the way she looked was wrong, too much, too wild, too loud. She had built an aesthetic. the beads, the feathers, the specific maximalism of her stage appearance that was entirely and deliberately hers.
Not an accident, not a failure of taste, a choice, a declaration. And Rolling Stone, the magazine that was supposed to understand that, looked at her declaration and called it the appearance of a [ __ ] not a reviewer she didn’t know, not a mainstream publication that had never understood her. Rolling Stone, her magazine, her world.
She was 27 years old. She was recording the best music of her life. She was by any measure at the absolute peak of what she had built, and she was devastated. In mid August 1970, Janice Joplain was scheduled to give an interview to Howard Smith of The Village Voice. Smith was a serious journalist. The Village Voice was a serious publication.
The interview was going to matter. She canled. The Rolling Stone piece was still too fresh. She could not face another journalist, another set of questions, another opportunity for someone to look at her and find her wanting. This was a woman who had performed for half a million people at Woodstock, who had commanded stages for 3 years in the full knowledge that every person in every room was watching every move she made.
and she could not get on the phone with a journalist from the Village Voice because she was still hurting from a paragraph about her jewelry. That is what criticism from a trusted source does. It reaches places that the approval of 500,000 strangers cannot reach. It lands in the specific wound that was always there waiting.
She was Port Arthur’s girl. She had been told she was ugly, wrong, too much. She had built a career on refusing that verdict, and Rolling Stone had given it back to her. In print, I want to pause here and ask you something because I think about this a lot. She could stop the world with her voice.
She could make 7,000 people go silent. She could make Mama Cass Elliot’s jaw drop at Mterrey. She had done all of that. And one paragraph in a magazine broke her for weeks. Have you ever had that where a thousand people saying something positive cannot outweigh one person saying something cruel? Tell me in the comments because I think it’s one of the most human things in this story.
She finally did give that interview on September 30th, 1970. And what she said in it tells you everything. Howard Smith called Janice Joplain by phone on September 30th, 1970. She was in Los Angeles. The Pearl Sessions at Sunset Sound were almost finished. Me and Bobby McGee had been recorded.
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MercedesBenz had been recorded. The album was nearly complete. By every account of people who spoke to her in those final weeks, she was in good shape, more focused than she had been in years, excited about Pearl, feeling like the music was the best she had ever made. Smith described her as sounding together, alert, present.
And then the Rolling Stone piece came up. She talked about it. She couldn’t not talk about it. It was still there. She said, “In my insides, it really hurts if someone doesn’t like me.” She laughed when she said it, she added. It’s silly. Listen to what she did there. She named the wound.
She acknowledged that the criticism had reached her. And then she immediately tried to dismiss it. It’s silly, she said, as if by calling it silly she could make it less real. But the laugh had a crack in it. Smith heard the crack. He had been a journalist for years. He knew the difference between someone who has healed from something and someone who is describing a wound while still bleeding from it.
She was still bleeding from it. That was September 30th. What makes this story so specific to Janice Joplain is the contradiction at its center. She was the most emotionally honest performer of her era. She put everything she had in front of audiences without protection, without management, without the professional distance that most performers maintain.
She gave them the real version every night. The cost of that total honesty was total exposure. She had no armor. She couldn’t have armor and also do what she did on stage. The two things were incompatible. So when Rolling Stone called her jewelry horish, when the trusted voice of her own world said that the way she presented herself was degraded, it went straight in.
There was nothing to stop it. A more defended person would have been angry, would have dismissed it, would have had the professional distance to say, “One critic, one piece, it doesn’t matter. She didn’t have that distance. It really hurts if someone doesn’t like me.” This was not weakness. This was the same thing that made her extraordinary on stage.
The same openness, the same total absence of protection. She received the cruelty the same way she received everything completely without armor all the way in. That was who she was. It was also why she could do what she did. Both things always at the same time. The Howard Smith interview contains something else.
something that stays with you later in the conversation, past the Rolling Stone discussion, past the hurt. She said something that Howard Smith has described as the sentence that defined the whole interview. She said, “You are what you settle for. You are what you settle for.” She said it in the context of ambition, of refusing to accept less than what she was capable of, of pushing herself toward the music she knew she could make.
But the sentence sits differently next to the Rolling Stone wound. She had not settled for Port Arthur’s verdict. She had not settled for ugly. She had not settled for wrong. She had not settled for the taxonomy of what a woman was supposed to be in Texas in 1960 or in the music industry in 1967 or in a Rolling Stone review in 1970. She had not settled.
She was what she was. the beads, the feathers, the jewelry, the voice, all of it. Because she had refused consistently since she was 19 years old to settle for anything less. You are what you settle for. She said it on September 30th. She died on October 4th. She never settled. Rolling Stone has published tributes to Janice Joplain many times over the 55 years since her death.
cover stories, retrospectives, rankings where she appears near the top of lists of the greatest singers who ever lived. The piece that called her jewelry horish is not something the magazine dwells on. History has a way of smoothing things like that. But she lived with it for the last months of her life.
She canled a major interview because of it. She was still talking about it 4 days before she died. She said it really hurts if someone doesn’t like me. She said it like it was something to be embarrassed about. It wasn’t. It was the most human thing she ever said. And she said it 4 days before the end. Still carrying the wound.
Still making the best music of her life. Still refusing to settle. That’s who she actually was. Not just the voice that stopped the world. The person who could be stopped by a sentence. both things at the same time all the way to the end. Subscribe because that’s all this channel does.
We find the real moments, the ones the legend skips, the ones that tell you who these people actually were. And if this story stayed with you, what does it remind you of? Tell us in the comments. You are what you settle for. She never did.
