A Night on the Town with Janis Joplin

My wife and I moved to Austin in the summer of 1984. It was hot then, no surprise; it’s even hotter now. Maybe it just didn’t bother then us as much, I don’t know. I do know the winters then were much colder. That first winter we had three significant snowfalls, including one of thirteen inches. The creek used to freeze over and any water standing outside our house would become a solid mass. Those events do not happen any longer, but … I digress. At any rate, since my wife’s serious stroke in late 2011, things have changed as we no longer go out to see music or to clubs or to see shows as she just doesn’t feel comfortable. We do go to the occasional movie together. If I want to see something and feel comfortable leaving her at home for a bit, I either go alone or at times with our son who lives in town. Jimmy is a (drawing) artist and musician, and operates a professional recording studio in an adjunct to his house.

 

When I learned the Broadway musical, “A Night with Janis Joplin” was coming to town, I just had to see it. The original actress in the lead role, Mary Bridget Davies, who was nominated for a Tony for her performance, headlined the cast. I booked the best seats available for the last performance, on a Sunday night following an afternoon matinee the same day. This could be a dicey move. Would it be difficult for the cast to be in top form twice in only a few hours? But it was the best timing for me and my son. Then, a day or two before the performance, Jimmy asked if he could cancel because he had a music tour of West Texas coming up in few days, and the coronavirus scare has everyone concerned about being in crowds. So what to do? Cancel? Just batch it? Try to get a buddy to go with me? One of my friends did take me up on the offer and met me at the theater, so at least I didn’t have to sit by myself.

 

The play was performed at the in the Zachary Scott Theater Center. Mort Topfer of Dell Computer zillions and his wife donated a ton of money to endow the project, so it’s officially referred to as the Topfer Theater Building. But it’s “The Zach” to most.

 

 

I met my friend, Tom, in the lobby where a guitar player and singer were performing for tips. It was a nice scene … very Austin … people milling around. As you might think, a Janice Joplin crowd was “of a certain age” but the entire spectrum was on display. In Austin, one sees anything and everything and the dress code, at least at a Broadway show like this, ranges from jeans and sweaters all the way to sports coats and stylish dresses. No one wears a tie. It’s comfortable, but Austin chic if that’s a term.

 

The house was only about half full for the final performance. I didn’t know if this reflected the coronavirus scare, or a reflection on the show. Although I had not been to the Zach for five years, the theater once again knocked me out in terms of the excellent seats, nice lobby, intermission bar and snack areas, as well as absolutely world-class lightning and sound systems.

 

The show itself is a creative biography of Janis Joplin, with ongoing dialogue between Janis and the audience stitched between music. She grew up in a middle class family in Port Arthur, Texas, a gritty oil refinery town near the Louisiana border often lying under smelly smog. Her mother’s goal for her unique daughter, who displayed unusual and promising skills as an (painting) artist, was for Janis to graduate from the University of Texas, and become a homemaker. That was not to be. Janis did come to Austin and enroll as a student at the University of Texas. She had a rough time at UT, did not fit into the frat/sorority scene, and was on her way to being a non-conformist and hippy. Wearing unconventional clothes, she was nominated as “Ugliest man on campus” at one time, which deeply hurt her. She dropped out of school during her first year, became part of the vibrant counter-culture during the Viet Nam era and did some singing at Threadgill’s, a restaurant and singer-friendly joint in north Austin.

 

Threadgill’s exists today pretty much as it was at the time, and features photos and other memorabilia of Joplin when she sang there.

 

Janis Joplin bounced back and forth between Port Arthur, Austin, and San Francisco. She tried college again in East Texas, before returning to the Bay Area and catching on with Big Brother and the Holding Company, an emerging metal psychedelic band. Over a year, Joplin changed from a quiet lead singer to a daring and confident front woman, the toast of the Bay Area.

 

Joplin (seated) with Big Brother and the Holding Company, c. 1966–1967 photograph Bob Seidemann

 

Oh, back to the show! The cast is small: six women. One is Joplin, of course, and the others are skilled singers and dancers who represent an ad-hoc back-up group (cheekily) dubbed the Joplinaires. They also are featured as the muses of Joplin, famous black singers who influenced her: Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Etta James, Odetta, and Bessie Smith. The music they pioneered is different from the heartfelt, belted out, raw bluesy work that came to personify Joplin’s greatest hits. To be honest, while some of the Janis Joplin classic hits are the best and most searing rock and roll hits of all time, there are not that many, and the music included several less-well known pieces. All in all, the performances of each of the singers were outstanding, and several brought standing O’s. However several songs were less known, at least to me, with courteous and even tepid response from the audience. Yet we were treated to a range of Joplin’s most famous work, including Down on Me, Piece of my Heart, Try (Just a Little Bit Harder), Mercedes Benz, and Me and Bobby McGee. That penultimate song, one of her all-time hits, was released posthumously based on a simple Acapella version she did in the studio shortly before she died.

 

Joplin performing in 1969

 

Ms. Davies was Janis. Both as a singer who was nearly indistinguishable from Joplin, and physically similar to Janis in appearance and manner, she was simply breathtaking in her excellence.

 

In a show like this, musicians are key. The band consisted of two lead guitarists, a bass guitar, a keyboardist, a percussionist, and a brass section consisting of a trumpet, trombone, and saxophone. I don’t know if they travel with the show or were locally sourced; they were simply tremendous.

 

The musical skipped over the ongoing addictions to drugs and made her preference for Southern Comfort a side-show. Nothing was mentioned about her numerous musical projects, with make-up bands or solo, following Big Brother, or TV appearances including The Dick Cavett Show. There was nothing about her troubled personal relationships; perhaps the essential musical theme prevented such a dark ending. However with only one piercing song at the end; any direct and honest dealing seemed to be an omission. Her October, 1970 death in a motel room, presumably alone, from an apparent heroin overdose, was treated as an ominous bete noire, hovering like an unseen evil spirit, the tragic ending of her life we knew was coming.

 

The cast received a well-deserved standing ovation.

 

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Enjoy life; it's the only one we will get.

J.K. (Jim) George

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