The clip has 14.7 million views on YouTube. Anyone can watch it right now. 2 minutes and 58 seconds. A Welsh coal miner’s son and a girl from Port Arthur, Texas. A variety television show. A song called Raise Your Hand. An audience that did not know what it was about to see. Most people who have watched that clip know the broadcast, the performance, the feather boa flying and both voices at full power and Tom Jones trying to hug Janis at the end and Janis stepping back and that being the perfect ending.
Almost nobody knows what happened in the rehearsal room the day before. Almost nobody knows the sentence that Tom Jones has been repeating in interviews for 50 years. Almost nobody knows what Janis Joplin said to the biggest pop star in the world in a rehearsal room in London in 1969 that he has never forgotten.
This is that story. Tom Jones in 1969, he was 29 years old. He had been the most famous pop singer in the world for four years since It’s Not Unusual went to number one in 1965 and changed his life so completely and so fast that there had been no time to process the change before the next change arrived.
By 1969, he had the television show This Is Tom Jones running in America and the United Kingdom simultaneously, attracting the biggest names in music, The Who, Stevie Wonder, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Sammy Davis Jr. A show that was, by the assessment of the music industry, the best variety program on television. Tom Jones had earned his position.
His voice was real. The coal miner’s son from Pontypridd who had taught himself to sing by listening to American blues and soul records had developed something that the record industry had figured out, belatedly, it knew what to do with. But, there was a problem with being Tom Jones in 1969. The problem was that his audience threw their underwear at him.
This is not a metaphor. Women threw their underwear at him during concerts. This had become his defining public image, the Welsh heartthrob, the entertainer, the performer whose appeal was understood to be primarily physical and primarily to a female demographic of a certain age. The music snobs, and 1969 was full of music snobs, had decided what Tom Jones was.
He was not a serious artist. He was not someone you listened to if you cared about the music. He was someone your mother liked. Tom Jones knew this. He had known it for years. He had the number one records and the sold-out arenas and the television show and the fame that most performers spend their entire careers hoping for.
And underneath all of it, the knowledge that the people who really mattered, the musicians, the critics, the tastemakers who decided what was serious and what wasn’t, had already put him in a box. He needed someone to tell him the box was wrong. Janis Joplin in 1969. She had left Big Brother and the Holding Company for the Cosmic Blues Band.
The reviews had been mixed. The year had been difficult. The specific freedom of the Big Brother sound, loose, wild, the five of them finding something together that none of them could find alone, was not present in the new configuration. But, her reputation was at its absolute peak.
She was the queen of rock and roll, the woman who had stopped the world at Monterey, the voice that Rolling Stone had called possibly the best female voice of her generation. When Tom Jones’ people reached out about appearing on the show, the answer, her default answer about variety television, was no. She did not do variety shows. This was a stated policy.
Variety shows were for the mainstream, for the entertainment industry, for the kind of careful, managed, market-tested presentation of music that was the opposite of what she stood for. Tom Jones was not deterred. “God bless her,” he would say decades later. She said to me when she came on, “Look, I don’t do variety shows.
I’m only doing it because it’s you.” So, she saw through it. She saw through the format. She saw the voice underneath the format. And she said yes. The rehearsal. This is the part almost nobody knows. They met in a rehearsal room at the ATV studios in London. The song was Raise Your Hand, an Al Bell, Eddie Floyd, Steve Cropper composition that Janis had been performing live.
A song that demanded everything a voice had, and rewarded the voice that gave it. The band ran through the arrangement. Tom Jones took his position. Janis took hers. And Tom Jones sang. Janis Joplin stood next to him and listened. Tom Jones had been performing for 4 years at the highest level. He had sung with orchestras and bands and choirs and on television stages in front of millions of people.
He had been called one of the best voices of his generation by people who knew about voices. And standing in a rehearsal room in London next to a woman from Port Arthur, Texas, who had come because she thought the voice underneath the format was real, he sang. And Janis Joplin stopped and looked at him and said, “Jesus, you can really sing.
” Read that sentence again. “Jesus, you can really sing.” From Janis Joplin. The woman who had said, “Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I’ll get it.” Talking about Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday and the voices she was measuring herself against and finding herself still short of. From the woman who had stopped the world at Monterey.
From the woman who knew better than almost anyone alive what singing actually was. Tom Jones said later, “I thought, thank God people like Janis Joplin had taken note.” The biggest pop star in the world in a rehearsal room needing a woman from Port Arthur, Texas to confirm what he already knew about himself.
That is the sentence he has been repeating in interviews for 50 years. Not the broadcast, not the 14.7 million views, not the moment at the end when she stepped back from the hug. The rehearsal room, the sentence. “Jesus, you can really sing.” December 4th, 1969. The broadcast. The live performance was everything the rehearsal had promised.
Janis went first. You better get up now, don’t you understand? Raise your hand. Her voice filling the studio with the specific quality that made rooms stop. Tom Jones watching her received something. The audience could see it in real time. The controlled performer becoming slightly less controlled, the professional becoming slightly more present, the man underneath the entertainer reaching for something he did not usually have to reach for because she was going there.
And the only way to stay in the room with her was to go there, too. Tom Jones hit notes in that broadcast that nobody who worked with him regularly had heard him hit. An observer later noted that he reached an F5, the highest note he had been documented singing. Janis Joplin got him moving. The studio audience got to its feet.
This was not what audiences did on This Is Tom Jones. They applauded. They appreciated. They did not rush the stage. After 30 seconds of Raise Your Hand, they were standing. At the end, Tom Jones turned toward Janis with the natural gesture of a performer who has just shared something significant. Arms slightly open, the habitual warmth of the end of song embrace, she stepped back.
One hand raised, the lightest possible no, thank you. Her own terms. Always her own terms. He understood. He said later, she saw through it. She came anyway. She made it better. Three words, she made it better. That is what Tom Jones has been saying about Janis Joplin for 50 years. Not that she was a great rock singer, though she was.
Not that the performance was extraordinary, though it was. That she made it better. That she came into the format she didn’t believe in and made it into something neither of them could have made alone. The clip has 14.7 million views. The comments on that clip are overwhelmingly from people who watched it in 1969 and are watching it again now.
People in their 60s and 70s describing the living rooms where they first saw it. The parents and grandparents they watched it with. The specific memory of sitting in front of a television on a December night in 1969 and not expecting what came out of those two microphones. One comment, “My whole family was up and dancing, jumping up and down in the living room.
Except for my dad, who just sat drinking his beer and laughed.” Tom Jones told his TikTok followers 50 years later, she looked at me and said, “You can really sing.” I’ve never forgotten that. The biggest pop star in the world, in his 80s, still telling a rehearsal room story from 1969. Because the rehearsal room story is the real story, not the broadcast.
The moment before the broadcast, the moment when Janis Joplin heard Tom Jones sing and forgot for a second that she had a stated policy about variety shows and said what she actually thought, “Jesus, you can really sing.” Here is what this story asks you. When did someone you respected, someone who really knew, whose opinion actually mattered, tell you something true about yourself that you already knew but needed to hear out loud.
Tom Jones had been singing for 4 years. He had the records and the arenas and the television show. He had been called one of the best voices of his generation by people who knew and he needed Janis Joplin in a rehearsal room to say it simply and honestly and without any agenda except the honest response of one singer to another, “Jesus, you can really sing.
” Not to make him feel better, not because it was polite, because she heard something real and said it out loud, the way she said everything without calculating the effect. That is who she was. In a rehearsal room, in a church, in a bar on her birthday, on a stage at 2:00 in the morning, in a dressing room singing a lullaby to a child, the same person, the same honesty, the same impulse to say what was true. He still talks about it.
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