Janice Joplain, the girl who never stopped believing she was ugly. She made love to 25,000 people every night. Then she went home alone. A future Super Bowl coach groped her in the hallways. A fraternity voted her the ugliest person on campus. She fled to San Francisco, stopped a festival audience in their tracks, and hit number one.
Then she returned to her high school reunion. They gave her a tire. 3 days before she died and she recorded the most joyful ac capella performance in rock history. Then she sat on a motel bed with $4.50 and change and died wedged between the nightstand and the mattress. 18 hours passed before anyone came looking.
She was engaged to be married. Her fiance wasn’t there that night. Neither was her ex-lover. Both had made other plans. She left $2,500 in her will for a party. She couldn’t attend. The dates, arrests, and court records are real. Where people argue is motive and what can’t be proven. This is Janice Joplain’s real story.
Number one, the future Super Bowl coach who bullied her. Janice Lyn Joplain was born on January 19th, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas. Port Arthur was a conservative oil refinery town where the Ku Klux Clan maintained an active chapter and the city slogan was we oil the world. Janice was the wrong kind of girl in the wrong kind of place. She read poetry.
She listened to Bessie Smith and Lead Belly. She wore men’s shirts and Levis’s to class. She spoke out against segregation. Her classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School called her pig, freak, creep, and [ __ ] They threw pennies at her in the hallways. But the most documented detail is who was doing the bullying.
Jimmy Johnson, the future Dallas Cowboys coach who would win two Super Bowl championships, was her classmate. In his 1994 autobiography, Johnson admitted he and his football teammate, targeted her because she ran with the beatnick crowd. Johnson and his teammates groped her and spread sexual rumors.
He gave her a crude nickname, referencing her pubic hair. When Sports Illustrated pressed him in 1993, Johnson admitted it was not based on primary research. He made it up to humiliate her. Janice was excluded from prom. At a 1970 press conference that when a reporter asked if she’d been asked to prom, she looked down and said quietly that she wasn’t asked.
She didn’t think that they wanted to take her. Her childhood friend Carlen Bennett. Later reflected that Janice couldn’t figure out how to make herself like everybody else. Bennett added, “Thank goodness she couldn’t, except here’s what makes it darker. The bullying didn’t end when she left Texas.
She carried Port Arthur with her for the rest of her life. Number two, the campus vote that drove her out of Texas forever. In late 1962, Janice enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin as an art major. She played auto harp and bars, went barefoot to class, dyed her hair orange. The campus newspaper profiled her under the headline, “She dares to be different.
inadvertently painting a target on her back. That semester, the Alpha Fi Omega fraternity held its annual ugliest man on campus charity contest. Someone launched a writein campaign and nominated Janice. She didn’t win. The title went to a fraternity member in a hunchback costume, but the humiliation was devastating.
Her friend Powell Street John recalled she cried afterward when he told her she was better than them. She shot back with a question that would define the rest of her life. Then why are they winning? Her mother Dorothy told biographer Myra Freriedman that Janice sent home an anguish letter about the contest.
Less than a month later, Janice wrote and recorded a song called It’s Sad to Be Alone. The lyrics describe walking to the end of a dusty road, sad and alone. A week after recording that song, she dropped out of the University of Texas, and hitchhiked to San Francisco with Chad Helms. Helms would later connect her to Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Her sister Laura later suggested Janice may have nominated herself as a joke, but every biographer agreed. The ugliest man on campus vote accelerated her departure from Texas. As Janice wrote in a 1965 letter, she finally decided Texas wasn’t good enough for her. But the Port Arthur girl, who believed she was ugly, never left her body.
Number three, Mama Cass’s jaw drops on camera at Mterrey. On Saturday, June 17th, 1967, Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Mterrey Pop Festival. Janice was 24 and virtually unknown outside San Francisco. Their manager refused to let the documentary crew film. When the audience reaction proved overwhelming, festival promoters begged the band to return.
Big Brother became the only act to play twice at Mter Ray. On Sunday evening, June 18th, the cameras rolled. Janice tore through ball and chain with volcanic intensity. Filmmaker D. Aenabaker’s camera cut to Mama Cass Elliot, visibly mouththing, wow. The most famous audience reaction ever filmed. Festival co-producer Lou Adler later said Otis Reading got their souls.
Robbie Shankar drove them out of their seats. And Janice tore their hearts out. Clyde Davis, then head of Columbia Records, was in the audience. He signed the band after buying out their existing contract for $200,000. The resulting album, Cheap Thrills, hit number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for 8 weeks.
But here’s where the triumph became a trap. Concert billings quietly changed to Janice Joplain with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Manager Albert Gman told her privately he could get her a quarter of a million dollars, but the deal was strictly for her. The deal did not include Big Brother.
By December 1st, 1968, she played her final show with the band. Guitarist Sam Andrew, who left with her, later said it was a really stupid decision, but she talked him into it. Mterrey made her a star. The stardom destroyed the band that made her a star. Number four, 25,000 people then Home Alone. The core paradox of Janice Joplain’s life can be captured in a single quote she repeated in interviews throughout her final years.
On stage, I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home alone. She was reportedly composing a song with this line as its title when she died. The stage persona was armor forged from childhood wounds. Severe teenage acne left her with permanent scarring that reporters never stop mentioning. One press description called her an unlikely sex symbol, a kinkyhaired, acne scarred, gravel voice shrew swilling a bottle of southern comfort.
Rolling Stone once called her an imperious [ __ ] Even at the height of her fame, she described herself as a plain overweight chick. Beneath the bravado, her letters home to Port Arthur reveal a woman desperate for approval. In 1966, after joining Big Brother, she wrote her parents that she was sure they were both convinced her self-destructive streak had won out again.
She wrote that she was awfully sorry to be such a disappointment and asked them to please believe that they couldn’t possibly want her to be a winner more than she did. In her final year, she wrote to her parents about how much you really need, need to be loved, and need to be proud of yourself. Dick Cavitt, who interviewed her three times on his show, described her as at once insecure yet full of conviction, opinionated yet concerned about offending, fierce yet tender-hearted.
A close friend summarized the paradox perfectly. Janice needed acceptance while at the same time rejecting the society from which she needed the acceptance and that’s where the drinking escalated. Southern Comfort became so associated with her that the company sent her a Lynx fur coat.
She joked, “Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for 2 years?” The bottle on stage wasn’t a prop. It was medicine for a wound that never healed. Number five, the 10-hour heroine way at Woodstock. [screaming] Janice Joplain’s Woodstock performance on the early morning of August 17th, 1969 is the single most damaging event in the mythology of her career.
She was originally scheduled for Saturday the 16th, but the festival’s cascading delays pushed everything back. She arrived at Bethl on August 15th and then waited. The delay stretched to roughly 10 hours. During that wait, documented by multiple witnesses, including Pete Townen, Joplain shot heroine and drank heavily backstage with Peggy Cacerta.
She finally took the stage with the Cosmic Blues Band at approximately 2 in the morning and performed for about an hour. She ran through Raise Your Hand, Try Just a Little Bit Harder, Cosmic Blues, and in chord with Piece of My Heart and Ball and Chain. Townshen, who watched from backstage, wrote that she had been amazing at Mterrey.
But tonight, she wasn’t at her best, probably due to the amount of booze and heroin she consumed while she waited. But he added that even Janice on an off night was incredible. The critical reception was devastating. Much of the set featured unfamiliar material from the not yet released Cosmic Blues album.
The new band lacked Big Brother’s raw chemistry. The ultimate insult came later. Not a single song from her Woodstock set was included in the original 1970 documentary or its soundtrack. Her performance wasn’t widely available until the 2009 Woodstock experience release. For a performer who staked everything on the live moment, being erased from the defining concert film of her generation was a wound she carried for the remaining 14 months of her life.
Woodstock should have been her coronation. Instead, it became the performance history for God. Number six, the reunion where they gave her attire. On August 14th, 1970, exactly 7 weeks before her death, Janice returned to Port Arthur for her 10-year high school reunion. She had announced it on the Dick Cavitt show, saying they laughed her out of class, out of town, and out of the state.
She told a reporter she was attending to see all those kids who were still working in gas stations while she was making $50,000 a night. She arrived in fullstage regalia. Purple and pink feathers, oversized pink sunglasses, purple and white satin, fluorescent orange toenail polish, and enough metal bracelets to build a prison cell. Her sister Laura had warned her.
Janice, this is a group of people coming to see people, not stars. At the press conference, a reporter asked what she remembered most about Thomas Jefferson High School. Her demeanor visibly fell. She stammered that she had no comment. When conversation turned to prom, she admitted she hadn’t been asked.
At least one classmate insisted they had liked her. Janice did not respond. Others gawkked or made catty comments. No one publicly recognized her achievements. Instead, the reunion committee presented her with a tire for having traveled the greatest distance. She left early and took her friends drinking at Houston clubs.
Days later, she called publicist Myra Freriedman in a dejected voice. Well, I guess you can’t go home again, right? Laura Joplain reflected years later that Janice thought it could be a triumph of people being curious and applauding, and it should have been. Seven weeks later, Janice was dead. Ford Arthur never gave her what she came for.
Number seven, MercedesBenz in a single take, then silence. The recording of Pearl at Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles represents Janice Joplain at her artistic peak and the crulest possible timing. Sessions began in early September 1970 with producer Paul A. Rothschild, best known for producing The Doors.
Rothschild called her a producers’s dream. Road manager John Cook said she was flowering, expressing what she saw as the future. She was changing her view of the future. On Thursday, October 1st, 1970, Joplain walked into the studio and recorded MercedesBenz. The song was a prayer to the Lord for consumer goods delivered completely a capella in a single take lasting 1 minute and 46 seconds.
She introduced it by saying she’d like to do a song of great social and political import. At the end, she exclaimed, “That’s it.” and laughed. It was the last song she ever recorded. That same session, she and the Full Tilt Boogie Band recorded a rockus birthday greeting for John Lennon, whose birthday was October 9th.
They sang Happy Trails. The tape arrived at Lennon’s home after she was dead. 2 days later, on Saturday, October 3rd, the Full Tilt Boogie Band laid down the instrumental backing track for Buried Alive in the Blues. Joplain came to listen and agreed with Rothschild to record her vocals the next day. She never did.
The track appears on Pearl as a haunting instrumental, a silent gap where her voice should be. When the album was released postumously on January 11th, 1971, it hit number one on the Billboard 200 for nine consecutive weeks. Me and Bobby McGee, on which she played acoustic guitar, became her only number one single and the secondostumous number one hit in American chart history after Otis Reading’s Doc of the Bay.
Chris Kristofferson, who wrote Me and Bobby McGee, didn’t know she’d recorded it until the day after she died. He had to leave the room when Rothschild played it for him. It was impossibly hard to hear. Number eight, the night both lovers abandoned her. The circumstances of October 3rd to 4th, 1970, contain a detail so heartbreaking it almost defies belief.
Janice was engaged to Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout and heir to the Ivory soap fortune. Morgan had met her while delivering cocaine to her Marane County home in July 1970. She had called city hall to inquire about a marriage license. She was planning a life. Days earlier on September 29th, Joplain had introduced Morgan to her close friend and former lover Peggy Casera at the Landmark Motor Hotel.
An agreement was made for the three of them to spend the following Friday night together. But on October 3rd, the night Janice died, both Morgan and Casera independently made other plans. Each believed the other would be with Janice. Neither told Janice they weren’t coming. Morgan had been seen meeting other women at a Maring County restaurant and inviting them to Janice’s home.
She had learned about this and it angered her. Casera carried the guilt for decades. She later said she wished Seth had been there that last night or that she had been there. She regretted that she wasn’t there when Janice tripped and fell. She could have picked her up. Instead, after leaving Sunset Sound around 11 at night, Janice drove organist Ken Pearson back to the landmark and drank at Barney’s Beanery with band members.
Then, she returned to Room 105 alone. In the lobby before partying, she expressed a fear, possibly half joking, that the band might decide to stop making music with her. Then she went to her room. She never came out. Number nine. $4.50 and 18 hours alone. What happened in room 105 of the Landmark Motor Hotel in the early hours of October 4th, 1970 has been reconstructed in forensic detail.
Around 4 in the afternoon on October 3rd, Joplain purchased heroin from her dealer. The dealer usually had a chemist test the purity. The chemist was out of town that weekend. The heroin was sold untested. According to Laura Joplain’s book, the heroin was 40 to 50% pure, four to 10 times stronger than typical street heroin.
Eight other people died from the same batch that weekend in Los Angeles. After midnight, Joplain injected heroin. Then she walked to the hotel lobby. Night clerk George Sandas gave her change for a $5 bill. She bought Marlboro for050. She walked back to room 105 with $4.50 and change. She sat on the bed. Before she could light a cigarette, she pitched sideways and struck her face on the nightstand.
Her body was not discovered for approximately 18 hours. When she failed to appear for her recording session Sunday evening, road manager John Cook drove to the hotel. He got a key and entered around 8. He later wrote that Janice was wedged against the bed and the bedside table. In her hand, there were $4 bills and two quarters.
There was dried blood on her face. A pack of Marl Bros sat unopened. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner known as the coroner to the stars, who also autopsied Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy, performed the autopsy. Official cause of death was acute heroin morphine intoxication. Accidental, possibly compounded by alcohol.
Numerous needle marks were found on both arms, some old and some recent. Her liver showed the damage of heavy alcohol consumption. She was 27 years old. Jimmyi Hendricks had died just 16 days earlier, also at 27. a friend who arrived before police removed drug paraphernalia from the room to protect Janice’s reputation. The friend returned the items after realizing an autopsy would reveal everything.
This detail was confirmed in Nguchi’s 1983 book, Coroner. Number 10. Drinks are on Pearl and a fiance’s eerie fate. Janice Joplain’s last will in testament had been updated on October 1st to 2nd, 1970, just 2 to 3 days before her death. Article 11 set aside an amount not more than $2500 to cause a gathering of my friends and acquaintances at a suitable location as a final gesture of appreciation and farewell.
She wanted roughly $200 friends to enjoy an allnight party. She reportedly said she wanted her friends to get blasted after she was gone. The idea had come from an August 1967 wake she’d performed at in Golden Gate Park for Hell’s Angel Chocolate George Hendris. She called it the greatest party in the world.
Her ashes were scattered from a plane over the Pacific Ocean and Stinson Beach on October 13th. Then on October 26th, 1970, the wake was held at the Lion Share in Sanelmo, California. Invitations read, “Drinks are on pearl. Roughly 300 guests came, including all members of Big Brother, Bolt Tilt, Boogie, and most of the Cosmic Blues Band.” The Grateful Dead performed.
Hashish Brownie circulated unknowingly, but road manager John Cook captured the evening’s bitter truth. Despite the music and the open bar that Janice funded, the party never achieved the energy level or the buoyant feeling of a ripping good time that Janice wanted it to be for the simple reason that she wasn’t here.
James Gurley, Big Brother’s guitarist, made a toast. Here’s to what’s her name. The aftermath contains one final eerie detail. Seth Morgan, the fiance who wasn’t there the night she died, spiraled into heroin addiction and served prison time after pinning a robbery victim’s hand to the floor with a knife.
While incarcerated, he won the Pan-American prisoners writing contest with an essay about Janice. He eventually got sober and published a critically acclaimed novel Homeboy in 1990. The New York Times called it the work of a Joysic and Hell’s Angel. Then on October 17th, 1990, 13 days after the 20th anniversary of Janice’s death, Morgan crashed his motorcycle on a New Orleans bridge, his blood alcohol was nearly three times the legal limit.
He had cocaine and percodan in his system. Both he and his passenger died instantly. Bullied by a future Super Bowl coach. Voted ugliest at the University of Texas. Fled to San Francisco and stopped Mama Cass in her tracks on film. Hit number one. Performed at Woodstock, but got erased from the documentary.
Went home to Port Arthur for Vindication and received a tire. Recorded the most joyful AC capella performance in rock history 3 days before dying alone in a motel room. The legend says Janice was the wild woman, the southern comfort girl, the rock goddess who made love to 25,000 people every night. The documented timeline shows a brilliant, sensitive girl bullied out of Texas who found glory on stage, but could never outrun Port Arthur. She made it to number one.
She got engaged. She planned a wedding. She left $25,000 for a party. But the Port Arthur girl who believed she was ugly never left her body. The Super Bowl coach moved on. The fraternity brothers got married and had careers. Janice sat on a motel bed with $4.50 and change and died wedged between the nightstand and the mattress.
18 hours passed before anyone came looking. Rolling Stone ranked her among the greatest singers in rock history. But the girl who was voted ugliest on campus didn’t live to feel beautiful. The woman who made love to 25,000 people every night went home alone. The rock goddess who left money for the greatest party in the world couldn’t attend. She died at 27.
The change was still warm in her hand. And if you want the full story on what the autopsy revealed about that weekend’s heroin batch, the detail that killed eight other people, and that even Janice’s friends refuse to discuss, subscribe. That’s coming next.
