In 2008, Joni Mitchell gave an interview to Mojo magazine. She was 64 years old. She had not performed in years. She was painting instead of making music. She was willing to say things she had kept quiet about for decades. A journalist asked her about Janis Joplin. Mitchell said, “She was very competitive with me, very insecure.
She was the queen of rock and roll one year, and then Rolling Stone made me the queen of rock and roll, and she hated me after that.” Janis Joplin had been dead for 38 years. She never got to respond. She never got to say whether any of it was true, whether the word hated was the right word, or whether something more complicated was happening between two women who were both too much for the world they were in, in different ways, for different reasons.
This is the story of what happened between them, and what it tells us about the impossible position women in rock music occupied in 1967, and 1968, and 1969, and 1970. In 1967, there were two women who mattered in the San Francisco music scene. Two women who were drawing serious critical attention. Two women who would both appear on the cover of major music publications within a year of each other.
Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. They were as different as two people who shared a world could be. Janis was from Port Arthur, Texas. She grew up middle class and desperate to escape. She found her voice by imitation. Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, the blues singers whose records she wore out as a teenager. Her voice was large and raw and technically imperfect and emotionally devastating.
She gave everything at maximum volume and let the mess be part of the music. Joni was from Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. She grew up middle class and quietly unusual. She found her voice by invention. Open guitar tunings that came from a polio-weakened left hand, an approach to melody that was closer to jazz than folk.
Lyrics that were confessional in a way that felt like reading someone’s diary without their knowledge. Her voice was precise and contained and technically extraordinary. She gave exactly what was needed and made the restraint feel like the most expressive choice available. Two women, two voices, two completely different ideas about what a song was supposed to do.
The music industry, which had very limited space for women at the top in 1967, treated them as if they were the same thing, because they were both women, because they were both young, because they were both attracting attention at the same time in the same city. The industry put them in the same category, the way a badly organized filing system puts two unrelated things in the same drawer because they’re the same size.
The drawer was labeled women in rock. There was only one slot at the top of that drawer. They met. They shared stages. On April 7th, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., both of them performed at a benefit concert in New York. Janis with Big Brother, Joni solo. Jimi Hendrix was there, Buddy Guy, Richie Havens.
It was one of those nights where the grief of the country gathered in a room and tried to find somewhere to go. They were in the same room. They heard each other. They understood, probably, what the other was doing musically. They were both too smart not to. But the industry had already decided that there was only room for one of them at the top.
And in 1967 and 1968, the industry had decided that person was Janis. She had Monterey. She had Cheap Thrills. She had the number one album and the sold-out shows and the magazine covers. She was the queen of rock and roll, Rolling Stone’s words, not hers. Joni was building something, quietly, methodically, the way you build something that is going to last.
Then something happened that Joni Mitchell described 50 years later as the source of Janis Joplin’s hatred. Rolling Stone gave the title to Joni. The magazine that had declared Janis the queen of rock and roll looked at the landscape in 1969 and made a different call. Joni Mitchell, whose album Clouds had just won the Grammy for best folk performance, whose writing was being compared to the best male singer-songwriters of the era, was now the queen of rock and roll.
The title transferred. In an industry that had room for one woman at the top, the one woman at the top had just been replaced. Mitchell said, “She hated me after that.” Maybe. Or maybe something more complicated was happening. Because here is what we know about Janis Joplin in 1969 and 1970. The Cosmic Blues Band was struggling.
The reviews were worse than with Big Brother. Sam Andrew had left and gone back. The vision she had for the new band, the soul review, the jazz influences, the nuance she wanted to find, was not coming together the way she had imagined. She had left Big Brother for money and artistic growth, and had gotten neither as completely as she’d hoped.
She was drinking more, using more. The gap between who she was on stage and who she was in the room after was wider than it had ever been. And Rolling Stone had given her title to someone else. Was what she felt hatred? Or was it the specific pain of someone who had fought their way to the top of a very narrow ladder and then watched the ladder get moved while they were on it? In 1967, the music industry had one slot for a woman at the top. Janis had filled it.
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Then the industry decided Joni fit better. Neither of them had designed the ladder. Neither of them had invented the one slot. They were both operating inside a structure that was wrong, and they were experiencing that wrongness from different positions. Janis experienced it as loss, the thing she had earned being taken.
Joni experienced it as pressure, the unwanted burden of being the chosen one in a system that punished women for being competitive with each other. Mitchell said, “I always thought the women of song don’t get along, and I don’t know why that is. I never felt that same sense of competition from men.
” She was right that she never felt it from men, because men had a hundred slots, not one. Men didn’t have to fight each other for the single available position. The system that made Janis and Joni competitive was not of their making. It was the structure they were born into. In April 1968, both of them performed at the Martin Luther King Jr. Benefit.
They were in the same room. They heard each other. They probably recognized on some level that what the other was doing was extraordinary and completely unlike what they were doing themselves. Janis’s voice, the banshee wail, the Port Arthur wound given full volume, had nothing to do with what Joni was building in the precise, jazz-influenced confessional space of her songs.
They weren’t competing. They were occupying completely different artistic territories. The competition was invented by an industry that couldn’t hold two women in the same room without forcing them into a hierarchy. Janis Joplin died in October 1970. She was 27. Joni Mitchell was still alive. She released Blue in 1971, widely considered one of the greatest albums ever made.
She continued making music for decades. She survived. Joni Mitchell lived to be 80 years old. In 2024, she performed at the Grammy Awards and received a standing ovation. The whole room rose for her. Janis Joplin was gone at 27. She never got to see how it all turned out. She never got to see whether the arc bent toward something more fair.
She never got to grow old enough to have the complicated feelings about the industry settle into something like wisdom. She was the queen of rock and roll for one year. Then the title went to Joni. And Janis died before she could find out what came after the loss of the title. Here is what this story is really about. It is not a story about a feud.
It is a story about what happens when an industry decides that only one woman can occupy the top position at a time, about what that decision does to the women who are forced to compete for the single slot, about how it turns peers into rivals and complicates what should have been solidarity. Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin were not natural rivals.
They were natural allies. Two women from different places and different musical traditions who had both found ways to turn their particular wound into extraordinary art. They should have been able to exist at at top of the same world simultaneously. The world they were in didn’t allow for that. Joni got to tell her side of the story in 2008 because she was alive.
Janis didn’t get to tell her side because she died in 1970 at 27 years old. Maybe Janis hated Joni. Maybe she was hurt and competitive and insecure. Those were Joni’s words and Joni experienced what she experienced. But maybe what looked like hatred was actually the specific grief of a woman who had fought her whole life to be taken seriously and had finally been taken seriously and then watched the seriousness be transferred to someone else.
The industry took the crown from Janis and gave it to Joni. Neither of them asked for a crown. Neither of them designed the system and only one of them got to grow old enough to tell anyone what it felt like. Joni Mitchell performed at the Grammy Awards in 2024. She was 80 years old. She sang both sides of the legacy, the wound and the survival.
Janis Joplin was 27 when she died. They started in the same city in the same year. They shared a stage in 1968. They were given the same title by the same magazine one year apart. One of them got to see what came next. The other gave everything she had in the time she had and left before the industry could take anything else from her.
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