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Scars of Sweet Paradise

The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

Today $12.79
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Item #: 2645561
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    The trajectory of Janis Joplin's life led her from the smelly cultural wasteland of Port Arthur, a town that had grown up around the Texas oil industry, towards the sweeter-smelling, artistically fertile environs of mid-1960s San Francisco. Fuelle......more

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The trajectory of Janis Joplin's life led her from the smelly cultural wasteland of Port Arthur, a town that had grown up around the Texas oil industry, towards the sweeter-smelling, artistically fertile environs of mid-1960s San Francisco. Fuelled by a burning desire to transcend her origins, as well as a healthy dose of ambition, she became one of a handful of musicians whose mere first names--Jim, Jimi, Janis--conjure the promise and tragedy of the Sixties. Alice Echols' sensitively written biography deconstructs the Joplin legend with revealing reminiscences from the singer's contemporaries, and particularly evocative descriptions of both the repressive atmosphere of'60s small-town Texas and the liberating, yet often sordid world of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Presenting Joplin's freewheeling and ultimately self-destructive career in all its messy detail--including her tangled love life, her triumphs at the Fillmore and at Monterey, and her frustration at the musical limitations of her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company--SCARS OF SWEET PARADISE is a refreshing reassessment of the'60s icon that shows the human being behind the myth.

Author:
Echols, Alice
ISBN:
9780805053944
Format:
Paperback
Pages:
408
Publish Date:
02/01/2000
Publisher:
Picador USA
Language:
English

Portions copyright 2005 Muze Inc. All rights reserved.

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  • Starred ReviewIn the introduction to this richly textured biography of the trailblazing blues-rock superstar who succumbed to a heroin overdose in 1970," Echols (Daring to Be Bad) informs us that she is not going to give us """"a blow-by-blow account of Janis's every fuck and fix."""" That is not to say that Echols sidesteps the sordidness of Joplin's short life. There's certainly enough drug use (""""She even shot up watermelon juice one day"""") and sex (with both women and men) to keep the reader titillated. But by tracing Joplin's place in the psychedelic movementvibrantly reconstructed here through more than 150 interviewsEchols presents the singer not just as a rock casualty but as a contradictory icon of female power"," """"neither just the ballsy chick who helped throw open the doors of rock 'n' roll nor the little girl lost who longed for the white picket fence."""" Joplin's outrageousnessher sexual conquests", inhuman consumption of Southern Comfort and eventual heroin addictionis presented as an expression of her insecurities. Stifled in her hometown of Port Arthur, Tex., by rigid gender roles and the cruel taunts of fellow teenagers who thought she was ugly and weird, she turned her teenage rebellion into a successful career as rock's first down 'n' dirty bad girl. Outside of Port Arthur, however, she found that even the hip Haight couldn't handle a woman who was neither a folkie nor the girlfriend of some guy in the band. Rock critics may have loved her, but as Echols reveals, even they seemed more concerned with her raw sexuality than with her talent: following the Monterey Pop Festival, which launched Joplin's career," the L.A. Free Press ran an article titled """"Big Brother's Boobs"""" while Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice wrote"," """"To hear Janis sing `Ball and Chain' just once is to have been laid"," lovingly and well."""" 140 b&w photos. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz", LLC. All rights reserved
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