Kristofferson was working as a helicopter pilot in Louisiana when he wrote “Me And Bobby McGee.” Fred Foster, Kristofferson’s boss at Monument Records, had called Kristofferson before he left for work one day, telling him he wanted him to write a song called “Me And Bobby McKee.” Bobby McKee was a secretary who worked in the same building as Foster. (There’s a legend about how Kristofferson wasn’t making anything happen until 1969, when he landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s front lawn, and Cash, impressed, recorded Kristofferson’s utterly perfect hangover lament “ Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”) Kristofferson struggled as a songwriter for a while, but he eventually started convincing big country singers to record his songs. (Come to think of it, he still is.) Kristofferson came from Texas, flew helicopters in the Army, and then turned down an offer to teach English at West Point, deciding instead to try his hand at writing country songs and, in the process, estranging himself from his family. Kris Kristofferson was a romantic figure, too. In a way, it’s almost like she wrote her own epitaph. It’s impossible to separate her version of the song from her death. And yet, by design or by accident, her version of the song captured the romanticism of the life she lived, as well as the squalor that came with that life. And her “Me And Bobby McGee” isn’t really a pop song.
Mostly, she was famous for being a motherfucker of a live performer, and for the way her records failed to capture the intensity of those shows. She’d had one real hit - Big Brother & The Holding Company’s take on Erman Franklin’s “Piece Of My Heart,” which peaked at #12 in 1968. Joplin was never much of a singles artist. But I think a lot of people probably saw it coming, or at least worried that it might happen. Otis Redding’s death had to come as a terrible shock. (The others were killed by murders or plane crashes.) The first posthumous #1 was Otis Redding’s “ (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay,” another virtuosic and bittersweet life-on-the-road song that ends in California. She was the only woman, and she was the only one who died of something that could be described as a long-festering disease. To date, there have been six musicians who went to #1 after dying. Joplin departed in October of 1970, 16 days after Jimi Hendrix. And then she died alone in a Hollywood hotel room after shooting up. She travelled the planet, slept with men and women, and tried every drug she could find - though she also went through periods where she tried to get clean. Her voice - ragged, ferocious, force-of-nature powerful - imprinted itself on a whole generation of kids.
#Jennifer love hewitt me and bobby mcgee series
She became a rock star, first singing for Big Brother & The Holding Company and then going solo and leading a series of her own bands. She came home, got clean, then returned to San Francisco and got hooked again. Joplin found her way to San Francisco and got herself hooked on heroin. Joplin started singing - first at local coffeehouses, and then at coffeehouses in Austin, where she was briefly a college student.
But she’d discovered old blues records, Bessie Smith records in particular, and through them, she’d found her superpower. This quiet girl had grown up in Port Arthur, Texas, bullied and stultified by the yokels around her. Janis Joplin was a terribly romantic figure, and her life story reads like a myth.
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