Port Arthur, Texas has a population of about 60,000 people. It sits on the Gulf Coast bracketed by refineries and chemical plants, the flat horizon broken only by industrial infrastructure and the occasional water tower. It is a working town. It has always been a working town. In August 1970, it was also the hometown of the most famous female rock singer in America.
Janis Joplin had come back for her 10-year high school reunion. She had been back before for her family, for the specific obligations of a person who left but never quite left entirely, but she had not been back like this, not after Monterey, not after Cheap Thrills, not after Time magazine. She arrived a day before the reunion events began, alone, early. She walked into a bar.
Nobody looked up. To understand what happened in that bar, you have to understand what Port Arthur had always meant to Janis Joplin. She was born here in 1943. She grew up here in a modest house on the flat Gulf Coast, the daughter of a man who worked at Texaco and a woman who had wanted more than Port Arthur offered and had found a way to want it gracefully.
She attended Thomas Jefferson High School. She was, by every account of people who were there, different from Port Arthur in every way Port Arthur measured difference, the wrong face, the wrong interests, the wrong music, the wrong body, the wrong everything. She said in interviews that she was laughed out of Texas, that the town rejected her before she rejected it, that the specific cruelty of adolescence, the cruelty that Port Arthur applied to her with the consistency of a place that knew what it wanted and did not want
what she was, had shaped her in ways she was still discovering. She had left. She had gone to San Francisco. She had found a world that had some use for what she was, and then she had become famous, and then she had become very famous, and then she had become the most famous female rock singer in America, and Port Arthur had not changed.
The bar she walked into on that August afternoon in 1970 was the kind of bar Port Arthur contained in abundance. Dark wood, a few afternoon regulars, a barman who had been wiping the same counter for 15 years, the specific atmosphere of a place that has not been asked to be anything other than what it is, which is a bar in a Gulf Coast oil town on a Tuesday afternoon.
She pushed open the door. She walked in. Nobody looked up. The barman did not look up. The afternoon regulars did not look up. The bar continued to be a bar. She ordered a bourbon. She took it to a corner table. She sat down. There is a specific experience that very famous people have when they return to the place they came from.
In most places, the fame precedes them. The name has gone ahead. People have been told or have seen the magazine covers or have heard the music on the radio, and when the famous person arrives, they arrive into recognition. Port Arthur was different. Not because the people there had not heard of Janis Joplin.
Cheap Thrills had gone to number one. The radio had played her. The television had shown her. They knew. But knowing and acknowledging are different things, and Port Arthur had a specific position on Janis Joplin, which it had held since she was 17 years old, and which a hit record had not entirely changed. She was the girl who had been too much, who had been wrong in all the ways the town measured wrongness, who had left and come back and left again and come back and left again.
The town’s position, yes, we know. We are going to act like we don’t. The barman continued wiping his counter. She sat in the corner and watched the room. Not with bitterness. Bitterness would have required something to be different from what she expected. She had expected this. She had always expected this. The specific reaction of Port Arthur to Janis Joplin was not new information.
It had been the same information for 15 years, but there was something about sitting in a corner of a bar in the city where you grew up after everything, after Monterey and Cheap Thrills and Madison Square Garden and Time magazine, sitting there with a bourbon and a cigarette in the afternoon light coming through the door and nobody looking at you.
There was something about that specific moment that required a response. The response she chose was to find it funny. Not performing funny. Not the laugh she used on stage or interviews or in the specific social situations where laughter was a tool. The private version. The small internal acknowledgement of something absurd. She had been on the cover of Time magazine.
The barman had not looked up. She laughed. Across the room, a man was looking at her. He was in his mid-30s. Port Arthur born. He had been watching her for a few minutes from his table the way you watch someone when you are trying to be certain of something. And then he was certain. He knew who she was.
He had gone to school with her or his sister had or he had seen her around the neighborhood when they were teenagers. He knew. He made a decision. He did not get up. He did not come over. He did not say her name. He looked at her across the bar in Port Arthur, Texas in the summer of 1970 and he decided to act like he didn’t know.
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She saw him looking. She saw the decision he made. Her chin went up slightly. She took a drink. The bar continued to be a bar. Port Arthur has a specific and complicated relationship with Janis Joplin’s legacy. She died in October 1970, 2 months after that bar visit. She was 27 years old. In the years after her death, Port Arthur had to decide what to do with the fact that it had produced her.
The decision was not immediate. There was for some years a version of Port Arthur that was more comfortable not discussing the subject in depth. The girl who had been wrong, the one who had left, the one who had done things that Port Arthur did not entirely approve of in the ways that Port Arthur had always disapproved of the things she did.
But eventually, the Museum of the Gulf Coast opened a Janis Joplin room. The house where she grew up became a landmark. The city began to organize tours. The name that Port Arthur had not known what to do with became the name that Port Arthur uses to explain itself to the world. Janis Joplin was from here. We made her.
Yes, they did. They also laughed her out. Both things are true. Port Arthur holds both of them in a room in a museum on a Gulf Coast street in the city where a barman once did not look up. She said in an interview years before she died, “I read that I’m a personality, not a musician.
” But maybe that’s just what Port Arthur thought. “They laughed me out of that town.” She said it without self-pity. She said it as a fact, the kind of fact you have known for so long that it has lost its sharp edges and become simply part of the landscape. She went to San Francisco. She became Janis Joplin. She went back to Port Arthur in August 1970.
She walked into a bar. She had a bourbon. She sat in corner and nobody looked up. She laughed to herself. Two months later she was gone. Port Arthur eventually put her in a museum. The barman is long gone. The bourbon was real. The laugh was real. Here is what this story asks you. Is there a place, a town, a school, a room, a specific set of people that never quite knew what to do with you? That looked at you and looked away.
That has since perhaps changed its accounting. Janis Joplin was laughed out of Port Arthur. She became the most famous female rock singer in America. She went back and Port Arthur acted like it hadn’t happened. She sat in a corner and found it funny. Not because it didn’t hurt, because it had hurt for so long that the hurt had become a kind of knowledge and knowledge in the end is funnier than the alternative. The barman did not look up.
She had been on the cover of Time magazine. She laughed. That was enough. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
