In 1970, in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, a young poet wrote a song for Janis Joplin. She was not famous yet. Janis Joplin was one of the most famous people in America. Patti Smith was 23 years old, living with Robert Mapplethorpe in room 1017, trading art for rent, spending the nights drawing and writing, absorbing the world she had arrived in.
She wrote a song. She called it lullaby. “I was working real hard.” She sang it to Janis Joplin one night at the Chelsea Hotel. Janis Joplin died in October 1970. She never recorded the lullaby. In 1975, 5 years after Janis died, Patti Smith performed the song publicly for the first time. At the Bottom Line in New York, with her band.
The song Janis never recorded, sung now by the person who had written it in a hotel room for a woman who was no longer alive. That recording exists. Anyone can hear it today. Almost nobody knows this story. The Chelsea Hotel in 1969 and 1970 was a specific kind of world. It was not a luxury hotel.
It was a building where artists and writers and musicians lived in a state of productive disorder, trading work for rent, running into each other in corridors at 2:00 in the morning, conducting the specific communal life of people who have decided that making things matters more than anything else.
Patti Smith described it in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, the book that won the National Book Award and told the story of her early years with Robert Mapplethorpe. She described walking into the bar next door to the hotel one evening and finding Janis Joplin at one table, holding court with her band, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane to the far right, Country Joe and The Fish nearby, and at the last table facing the door, Jimi Hendrix, head lowered, eating, hat on.
An ordinary evening at the Chelsea Hotel in 1969. The entire world of American rock music at dinner in the same room. Patti Smith was not a rock musician yet. She was a poet, a writer, someone who was still figuring out what she was becoming. She had come to New York from South Jersey with almost nothing and had found, through the specific providence that sometimes operates in the lives of people who are completely committed to making things, her way into the world of the Chelsea Hotel and the company of people like Robert Mapplethorpe and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. She was not famous. Janis Joplin was enormously famous, and they knew each other, not as peers, not as equals in the industry, as two people living in the same building, moving through the same corridors, occupying the same bar on different evenings.
Patti Smith has described, in interviews about the Chelsea years, listening to Janis Joplin complain about her love life, staying up all night drawing and writing and absorbing what she could from the world she had arrived in. Janis Joplin talking about a man who was disappointing her. Patti Smith listening, the most famous female rock singer in America and a young poet nobody knew late at night in the Chelsea Hotel, one talking and one listening.
The song Patti Smith wrote Lullaby, I was working real hard for Janis Joplin. The specific circumstances of the writing are not fully documented. When exactly she wrote it, what prompted it, whether it came from one of those late night conversations or from something else. What is documented is what happened next.
She sang it to Janis Joplin one night at the Chelsea Hotel. Read that sentence again. She sang it to Janis Joplin one night at the Chelsea Hotel, not in a studio, not on a stage, in a room in a hotel in New York City. A young poet who had written a song for the person she was sitting with, singing it to that person in the private way that songs are sometimes given to the people they were made for.
We do not know exactly what Janis said or did when she heard it. We do not know what the room looked like or what time of night it was. We know that it happened. Patti Smith said so. She put it in her writing and it is referenced in the documentation of the period. The song is called Lullaby.
It was written for someone who was struggling, someone who was at the top of the world by every public measure and was struggling underneath the public measure, the way she had been struggling since Port Arthur, the way she would struggle until October 4th, 1970. The lullaby is for someone who was working real hard.
She was. Janis Joplin died on October 4th, 1970. She was 27 years old. She never recorded the lullaby. Patti Smith was 23 years old. She kept writing, she kept performing her poetry, she kept becoming what she was becoming. In 1973, she met guitarist Lenny K and began adding music to her poetry readings.
In 1975, she and Lindsey Buckingham No Wait. In 1975, the Patti Smith Group released Horses, one of the greatest albums ever made by anyone. The album that changed what rock music could say, what a female performer could be, what poetry and punk and electric guitar could become when they found each other.
The album that proved that the young poet who had been listening to Janis complain about men late at night in the Chelsea Hotel had been building towards something the whole time. Also in 1975, Patti Smith performed at the Bottom Line in New York, and she sang the lullaby. Five years after Janis died, five years after the last time she heard the song was in a Chelsea hotel room.
Advertisements
Patti Smith stood up in front of an audience and sang it for a woman who was not there, who had never recorded it, who had heard it once in a hotel room from someone who had written it for her. The live at the Bottom Line recording from 1975 contains Lullaby, I was working real hard. Anyone can hear it.
The song exists. It is there. Janis Joplin’s version does not exist because she died before she could make it, but Patti Smith’s version exists. The version that was always meant to be given to Janis, now given instead to whoever is listening. Here is what this story tells us about both of them.
Janis Joplin, at the peak of her fame, in the last year of her life, was sitting in a bar and complaining about her love life to a young woman nobody had heard of. She was not managing her image. She was not being Janis Joplin the rock star. She was being a person who was lonely and wanted to talk about it and found someone to talk to.
Patti Smith, not yet famous, not yet anything except committed, was listening. And she made something from what she heard, a song, a small private gift for someone who was struggling. That is what artists do when they know how. They listen. They make something from what they hear. They give it to the person they made it for.
The song was given. Janis died. Patti sang it anyway. Five years later, for an audience who had not been in the hotel room. Patti Smith is 77 years old. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Her album Horses is on every list of the greatest albums ever made. She has spent 50 years writing about loss and beauty and the specific weight of carrying the memory of people who are gone.
She knew Janis Joplin in the private way, not the famous way, not the performance way, the Chelsea Hotel late night way. The complaint about a man way, the receiving a lullaby in a lamplit room way. That Janis Joplin is mostly not visible in the historical record. Patti Smith saw her. She wrote a song about it.
She sang it to her. She sang it again five years later to an audience for the person who was no longer there. The lullaby exists. Janis never recorded it. Patti sang it anyway. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
