Chris Kristofferson played the song for Janice Joplain and she walked out of the room before it was finished. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t explain. She just stood up, picked up her drink, and left. Kristofferson sat alone with his guitar for a few minutes trying to work out what had happened. In the years he had spent writing songs and watching people hear them for the first time, he had learned to read a room.
He thought he understood what a bad reaction looked like. He was not prepared for what came next. On October 1st, 1970, Janice Joplain recorded Me and Bobby McGee in a single take. 3 days after that recording session she was dead. The song was released postumously. It became the only number one single of her career.
By 1970, Chris Kristofferson was 33 years old and had been writing songs seriously for the better part of a decade. He had taken an unusual path to Nashville. a road scholar, a former army helicopter pilot, a man who had turned down a teaching position at West Point to clean floors at Colombia Recording Studios because he wanted to be close to where the music was made.
His colleagues thought he was throwing his life away. He thought he was doing the only thing that made sense. The songs he was writing in those years were not the songs Nashville expected. They were specific in the way folk songs are specific, grounded in particular places and feelings, but they had a literary compression that set them apart from what was moving on the charts.
He had been collecting rejections for years. He had also by 1970 started placing songs. The doors were opening slowly. Me and Bobby McGee had been written in 1969 with Fred Foster. Roger Miller had recorded it. Gordon Lightfoot had recorded it. The song was already in circulation. But Kristofferson had held it back from certain people.
The people he thought might do something specific with it that he couldn’t quite name until he heard what that something was. Bobby Newworth introduced them. New Worth was one of Janice’s closest friends in the final year of her life, her road companion, her creative collaborator, the person who understood her particular frequency in a way that very few others did.
He was also deeply embedded in the folk and singer songwriter world, and he thought the song and the singer belonged together in a way that was worth arranging a room for. The room when it happened was small and informal, a gathering rather than a performance. Christopherson had his guitar. Janice had her drink. There were a few other people present, though the exact number and names are remembered differently depending on who was doing the remembering.
Kristofferson played the opening. The song begins simply, “A road, a freedom, a person named Bobby McGee, and the specific feeling of being young and moving and untethered in a way that is indistinguishable from happiness or loss, depending on which side of the experience you are standing on.” The lyric has a quality of looking back at something already gone, even while it appears to be still happening.
He was perhaps 2/3 of the way through when Janice stood up. She picked up her drink. She walked out of the room without a word. Christopherson finished the song anyway, not for the remaining people in the room, but because stopping midong felt wrong in a way he couldn’t override. He set down the guitar.
He sat with it for a few minutes. He went through the possible explanations. She didn’t like it. The most obvious reading of someone walking out. She was bored. She had somewhere else to be. She had heard the Roger Miller version and felt she already knew the song. He worked through each of these and found that none of them fully accounted for what he had seen on her face in the moment before she stood up, because he had seen her face just for a moment.
And what he had seen there was not boredom. It was not dismissal. It was something closer to the expression of someone who has been handed something they are not yet sure how to hold. Neworth found him sometime later. He said not to worry about it. He said that was how Janice processed things. She needed to take them somewhere private before she could know what she thought.
He said if she walked out, it usually meant something had gotten through. She came back, not that night, sometime after. The timeline of exactly when is one of the details that shifts depending on the source. But she came back and she told Christopherson she was going to record the song.
She said it the way she said things she had decided without preamble, without explanation, simply as a statement of fact she expected him to accept. He asked her what she had thought when she walked out. She said she had needed to be somewhere else with it. She said, “Some songs you can hear in a room and know immediately what to do with them, and some songs you have to carry for a while before you understand where they fit inside you.
” She said this was the second kind. Kristofferson said he didn’t ask anything else. He said it seemed like enough. On October 1st, 1970 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Janice Joplain recorded Me and Bobby McGee with the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She recorded it in a single take. The people in the studio that night said later there was a quality to the session that was different from the sessions around it.
Advertisements
Not more polished, but more complete. as if the song had been waiting for exactly that voice and she had been waiting for exactly that song and the distance between them had finally closed. 3 days later on October 4th, Janice Joplain was found dead in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Los Angeles. She was 27 years old.
Pearl was released in January 1971. Me and Bobby McGee was the lead single. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1971, the only number one single of her career. She had been dead for 5 months. Chris Kristofferson watched what happened to the song over the decades that followed. He watched it become one of the definitive recordings of its era.
Not just a great performance, but a document of something. The specific sound of a voice that understood what the lyric was about from the inside. Because the lyric is about freedom and loss, and the way the two are sometimes the same thing, and she had been living that equation her entire adult life. He said in later years that he thought about the night she walked out of the room.
He said he understood it better in retrospect. She hadn’t left because she didn’t like it. She had left because she liked it too much to stay in the room with it. Because some songs require more privacy than a gathering can provide. Because some things you have to take somewhere quiet before you can begin to know what they are going to mean. One take.
October 1st, 1970. Three days before the end, the song had been written about freedom, [clears throat] the specific freedom of being young and moving and untethered. The freedom that looks like happiness from the inside and like loss from the outside, and sometimes like both at the same time. She had spent her whole life living that equation.
She understood it the way you understand something you have not just observed but inhabited. The lyric ends in leaving. It ends in the memory of someone who was there and then wasn’t. It ends in the specific ache of a freedom that cost something you didn’t know you were spending until it was gone. Kristofferson wrote it. Janice recorded it.
one take because one take was enough because she had been carrying it long enough that by the time she stepped to the microphone everything that needed to be there was already there. She never heard it on the radio. She never knew it reached number one. She never knew it would become the song people heard when they thought of her voice. She just walked out of a room when she first heard it because she needed to be somewhere else with it first and then she came back and then she sang it once.
Subscribe. There are more untold stories waiting.
