She Paid $3500 for That Porsche — Fifty Years Later It Sold for $1.76 Million JJ

In September 1968, Janice Joplain paid $3,500 for a used Porsche. She commissioned a roadie named Dave Richards to paint it for $500. He called the mural the history of the universe. On December 10th, 2015, that car sold at auction for $1,760,000, a record for any Porsche 356 ever sold at public auction.

This is everything that happened in between. Janice Joplain grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, where cars meant freedom when she got her driver’s license in 1958. She was 16 years old, and she commemorated the moment in her teenage scrapbook. She wrote home to her mother about the cars she drove in San Francisco, a beatup Sunbeam that she had to hotwire because she lost the key, a starter motor that burned out, a breakdown in Berkeley that left her needing to raise $75 for repairs.

She wrote, “It was a nice, clean, healthy little car, and now it’s an outand-out beatnick car, and it knows it. She loved cars. She always had. They represented the thing she had been chasing since Port Arthur. The ability to go somewhere else, to be somewhere other than where you were.” In September 1968, Cheap Thrills was at number one.

She had the money. She went to Beverly Hills and paid $3,500 for a 1964 Porsche 356C cab Cabriolet Dolphin Gray, the top of the range model. The final year the 356 was made. The car that was about to become the most recognizable vehicle in California. The gray didn’t last long. She brought in Dave Richards, a roadie for Big Brother and the Holding Company, who was also a painter, and gave him the car and $500, and told him to do what he wanted.

He applied a base coat. Then he painted for weeks. Portraits of Big Brother band members. Janice’s astrological sign Capricorn. The Marane County landscape on the right door. The eye of God on the hood. Butterflies, jellyfish, skulls, mushrooms, the cosmos. Under the gas flap, a small painting of a man’s face spewing his guts.

He called it the history of the universe. And then, a decision that would prove critical in the decades ahead, he covered the entire mural in a clear coat of protective lacquer. By the end of 1968, Janice Joplain was driving the most recognizable car in San Francisco, possibly the state of California. Her former boyfriend, David Nhouse, remembered, “I’d parked the Porsche, and by the time we came back, there’d be 150 people around the car.

” Laura Joplain, her sister, said wherever Janice went in the car, her fans recognized it. When she parked it and returned, there was always at least one note under the wipers. Fan notes tucked under the windshield wipers left by strangers who wanted to leave something for the woman whose car they recognized on the street. In 1969, someone stole it outside the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.

The most recognizable car in California taken from a parking lot by someone who had not thought through the obvious problem. The thief began spray painting over the mural. He was trying to make it unidentifiable. He was trying to hide what he had. He was not fast enough. The police found the car before the job was done.

And because Dave Richards had covered the mural in clear coat, the offending spray paint came off the protective layer cleanly. the history of the universe intact. Every butterfly, every jellyfish, the eye of God, the clear coat had saved the art. Richards had made that decision, the extra step, the protective layer in 1968 with no way of knowing that it would matter for the next 50 years. It mattered.

On October 4th, 1970, Janice Joplain died in room 105 of the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood. The Porsche was in the parking lot. It waited. Albert Gman, her manager, also Bob Dylan’s manager, the large bear-like man who had run her career, took possession of the car. He drove it. He kept it at his estate in Bearsville, New York.

He lent it to visiting friends and family. The psychedelic Porsche from San Francisco, now in upstate New York, still going somewhere. Eventually, Grossman returned it to Janice’s siblings, to Laura and Michael. And Michael Joplain made a decision that he would later reverse. He had the car restored to its original dolphin gray.

The history of the universe painted over, gone from view, protected by the clear coat underneath, but invisible. The car looked like an ordinary Porsche again. For a while, in the 1990s, the family changed their minds. They commissioned two artists, Jana Mitchell and Amber Owen, to replicate the original mural. The two women worked from stacks of period photographs, hunting down every image that showed the car from every angle, reconstructing the history of the universe from documentation.

Every butterfly came back, every jellyfish, the eye of God on the hood, the Marin County landscape on the right door. All of it returned to what it had been. The car became itself again and in 1995 it went to Cleveland. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Janice Joplain in 1995. Laura and Michael Joplain accepted on her behalf and the car, the restored, repainted history of the universe Porsche went on display in the museum.

It stayed for 20 years. Visitors from all over the world came and stood in front of it. People who had been alive when she drove it through San Francisco. People who knew it only from photographs. People who had never heard of Janice Joplain until they walked into that room and saw the car and asked, “Whose was this?” The car was its own explanation.