... _{Scars of sweet
.......... ^Paradise........ ^{THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANIS JOPLIN}}

408 PAGES

BY MARK ATHITAKIS | Janis Joplin hasn't aged well. In the years since her death from a heroin overdose on Oct. 3, 1970 -- with about a dozen sea changes in rock music between then and now -- she has come to look less like a historic figure and more like a strung-out caricature, a drug-sodden Everyhippie. Like Altamont and Woodstock, Joplin is famous today not so much for what she was as for what she represented: the embodiment of all that was good and bad about the '60s rock scene. She's an avatar of sex and smack.

The decline in her reputation is a result of at least two forces. First, her music now resides almost exclusively on classic-rock radio. That's no place for the musician who was arguably our greatest white female blues singer (she hasn't had much competition), but there she is, the color and power of "Piece of My Heart" and "Me and Bobby McGee" fading when they're programmed between songs by ELO and Foghat. Second, she's fallen victim to a slew of mediocre biographies by writers who, whether they're impartial journalists or old friends, have each picked at a particular part of the corpse and ignored the rest.

So it's worth noting that Alice Echols has an agenda in "Scars of Sweet Paradise" as well. But it's a nobler one: She wants this umpteenth book on the singer to reclaim her as an emotional human being, complex but not mysterious. While Echols is digging from the same well-mined vein of public records, press commentaries and interviews with associates who are sick of (or gun-shy about) discussing Joplin, it's what she does with the data that matters. Neither too blithe nor too exuberant, she lays out Joplin's history instead of reducing her to a victim or saddling her with the weight of myth.

Part of Echols' success can be attributed to her providing context beyond Joplin's family, friends, enemies and bandmates. She delves deep into the world of Port Arthur, Texas, the sleepy, go-nowhere oil town that bred not only the young Joplin's wanderlust but also the brashness with which she cloaked her anxieties about her looks, her talent and her need to be accepted. But as much as Joplin was molded by Port Arthur (to which she returned for a time in the mid-'60s, contrite, in a failed attempt to fit in), she was also a product of San Francisco. Echols makes it clear that the Haight-Ashbury scene was in many ways bullshit: a world of original ideas and of brilliant musicians, sure, but also one that was equal parts self-satisfaction and druggy self-destruction.

Echols focuses too much, perhaps, on Joplin's sex life, particularly her lesbian affairs, though she says in her introduction that she isn't attempting to "pathologize or normalize Janis or make her over into a true lesbian." The sexual magnifying glass is her response to other writers' having either ignored or overstated Joplin's sexuality. It's also an occupational hazard for Joplin's biographers: However singular her boozy, ballsy wail was, she lived only 27 years -- thin gruel for any book. (The need for material also explains Echols' almost obsessively lengthy documentation of the 1967 Monterey Pop performance that was the highlight of the singer's career.)

Still, its detail and its balance make "Scars of Sweet Paradise" the definitive Janis Joplin biography. But with Joplin's legacy limited to classic-rock radio and to the music of neo-hippie singers like Alanis Morissette (thin gruel herself), how much does it matter?
SALON | March 16, 1999

Mark Athitakis is the music editor of the SF Weekly.