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Musings Report #19 5-7-16 Cheap Thrills: 1967-1970
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Cheap Thrills: 1967-1970
The recent PBS documentary on Janis Joplin, Little Girl Blue (1:42 hrs) got me thinking about a number of dynamics that speak to more than music, fame or an individual personality: rather, they speak to cultural eras, the nature of talent, the costs of not fitting in, and our ties to family.
On the surface, the story of Janis Joplin is almost mythically American: a young woman who didn't fit the conventional roles expected of her finds artistic freedom and rock-n-roll stardom in free-wheeling psychedelic San Francisco of the late 1960s.
But the price of fame is high, and in Joplin's case, tragic: like so many in the drug-infused music world of the time, Janis died of an accidental overdose at age 27 in October 1970.
There is much more to the arc of Janis Joplin's life than the mythic ascent to fame and the crash to an early death.
Those of us who were alive at the time have memories of the era (I was in my senior year of high school in 1970), but since we were as young (or younger) than the musical icons of the age, we couldn't possibly grasp the full historical context.
In thinking about the documentary, I was struck by the following:
1. Everyone was impossibly young. Janis was 24 when she took the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival. Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Jerry Garcia--many of the musical icons were 25 or younger. John Lennon was one of the older crowd, being all of 27.
2. Older adults are essentially non-existent in the film. The young musicians had few older adults to turn to for advice or mentoring. Other than a few promoters and managers, there were virtually no mentor-quality adults in the rapidly evolving rock music industry.
Many of the older adults were more interested in maximizing their personal gain than in nurturing young talent. Albert Grossman, Joplin's manager, famously took out a $200,000 life insurance policy on Janis rather than confront her drug use. (He collected on the policy after her death.)
The dearth of adults was partly the result of the newness of the scene: there was no history, as it was being made as the music, players and audiences rapidly evolved. The few older adults had transitioned out of the folk music circuit (small clubs) into the rock scene.
Adults outside the counterculture might as well have been aliens from a distant planet. The life experiences of Joplin's parents, for example, had essentially zero overlap with the life their daughter was leading.
This left the young artists in a pressure-cooker of high expectations, big money, exhausting touring schedules and easy access to drugs with very little life experience or guidance from elders to help them. No wonder so many got ripped off by managers and handlers and lost their way in drugs.
The Beatles were fortunate in having two (somewhat older) adults to help manage their talent and success: Brian Epstein and George Martin (Abbey Road Studios). Janis had no equivalent stabilizing influences.
3. It didn't cost much to live in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Though the documentary doesn't address the economic context, jobs were plentiful and rent, food and energy were all cheap. The bands rented beautiful old Victorian houses in the Haight because they were cheap.
Though nobody knew it at the time, 1967 - 1970 was the peak of the postwar American boom. Life would get harder and more expensive from then on.
4. The rock music universe was chaotic and self-organizing. Anything was possible. Anyone could teach themselves guitar, bass or drums and start a band.
5. Music and culture were interconnected feedback loops--"the counterculture." It's been so long since music had a serious impact on culture that it's easy to forget that it once had the power to change fashion, graphic design, lifestyles and mindsets. The rock scene was not limited to music--it was also fashion, lifestyle, language and politics, implicitly or explicitly.
6. Hard drugs destroyed people and lives. When the scene shifted from marijuana and LSD to meth, cocaine and heroin, many spiraled into self-destruction. In our era, the path of self-destruction is often legal opiates and powerful psychotropic drugs: anti-psychosis meds, etc.
When you drink alcohol, previous experience is a reasonable guide to the consequences of drinking X amount of alcohol: if you got drunk on three shots of whiskey before, you can count on getting drunk on the same dose, which is reliably 80 proof.
With street drugs, who can tell what's in the stuff? Janis probably shot up a dose of heroin that she reckoned was about the same as her many previous injections, but she guessed wrong. the same is happening now as people mix psychotropic and legal opiates: nobody knows what the effects of various combinations will be within any individual.
7. In today's lingo, Janis had few emotional filters. She felt every insult, slight and abandonment intensely, and was able to express her hurt on stage with few (if any) filters. As she famously said, "I make love with 25,000 people (from the stage) and go home alone."
Pain is a powerful engine. Many artists are powered by pain and insecurity, but it requires self-knowledge and discipline to control the darker side of this power. That (hopefully) comes with age.
8. Prince (R.I.P.) once said something about transcendence being the goal of every performer/artist. Joplin's best performances transcend the medium of rock and her own personality and reach right into the listener's soul. Musical transcendence supersedes genres; as I mentioned in a Musings two years ago, I saw violinist Julia Fischer deliver a searing encore that left the audience gasping for breath. the name of the piece didn't matter, the composer didn't matter, even her technique didn't matter: it was a transcendent performance straight from the wellspring of her artistry.
Where did Joplin's ability come from? There is little evidence of musical talent in her immediate family (unlike, say, Mozart). It took many years of practice to develop her voice, but she had an innate ability that few recognized until she was already celebrated. The producer of her last album felt she had much more to give once she gained full control of her many voices.
What can we conclude? Humanity is a wellspring of "out of the blue" talent, drive and ability.
9. Joplin's fame and fortune did not substitute for the approval of her parents, which she so clearly pined for but did not receive. It doesn't appear that Joplin was emotionally abused as a child. Rather, she was unappreciated. She did not fit into the Port Arthur, Texas of her day, and she could not fulfill the expectations of her parents for a conventional life. Even at the height of her fame, she was apologizing for being unable to fill the roles her parents expected of her.
Lacking this needed parental approval, Joplin was riven by emotional insecurities. She was uncomfortable in her own skin because her real self was unacceptable: not pretty enough, not conventional enough, etc.
Everyone who was an outsider in school understands this. As Albert Camus observed, "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
Many of us feel that our parents never understood us, and Joplin's life illustrates the dynamic: there is nothing in a conventional life to give parents the wherewithal to understand a child who is unconventional. All the conventional parent can do is say, "I don't understand your talent or what you do, but I'm so proud of you and love you to bits."
10. The unconventional person must eventually develop a self-reliance that lessens the need for the approval of others. Given that the approval of others is contingent and fickle, there is no security in looking for approval from others.
This is easy to say, and hard to do. It would be easier if fame was reserved for the unconventional sorts who plod along for decades under their own power, but it naturally flows to what's scarce, which in a market economy is the new, fresh thing.
11. The Cheap Thrills of 1967 to 1970 made gobs of money for some people. Joplin and her band were paid peanuts for their first album (again, no adults were available to look out for their interests), and $15,000 per gig once their fame rose. But Joplin herself made $50,000 per gig after she left Big Brother and the Holding Company--roughly $300,000 in today's money.
David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash estimated he made and blew $25 million, which suggests (given artists royalty rates) his record companies made many multiples of that amount.
12. Joplin chose material from the African-American musical experience that spoke of romance's heartaches: yearning, hope, unrequited love, sacrifice, abandonment, loss and mourning. No wonder her young audience was enthralled, for nothing is quite as sharp as the intensities of romance in young hearts.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
No Wonder We're Poorer: Wages' Share of GDP Has Fallen for 46 Years 5/6/16
One Chart Says It All 5/5/16
Eight "New Normal" Charts That Are Insanely Abnormal--and Dangerous 5/4/16
Either Reverse All the Perverse Incentives or the System Will Implode 5/3/16
Why Are We So Unhealthy? Our System Makes Us Sick & Keeps Us Sick 5/2/16
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Homemade cookie-fest at our house: oatmeal-sunflower-chocolate chip, sickerdoodles, biscotti and peanut butter.
Market Musings: is the Shanghai Accord on the USD Breaking Down?
Following the G20 Shanghai meeting in March, the US dollar promptly tanked, arousing a widespread view that there was an accord to drive the USD down as a way of sparking a recovery in China, commodities and stocks.
But this concerted intervention appears to be wearing off, since the fundamentals remain unchanged: the economies of China, Japan and the Eurozone are weakening and structurally burdened. In contrast, the US looks like a safer place to park capital, hence the USD's recovery.
Pulling up a chart of the USD, we find a few interesting points. One is the recent low corresponds to the 38% Fibonacci retrace of the big move from 80 to 101. This retrace is healthy and to be expected in a long-term uptrend.
MACD looks like it could be setting up to reverse its multi-month decline, and the stochastics are extremely oversold. All this suggests the low may be in for the USD.
If the USD continues gaining ground, that means trouble for China, commodities and stocks.
From Left Field
Why must the Trump alternative be self-satisfied, complacent Democrats? -- indeed...
Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016
Why Donald J. Trump Will Be the Next President of the United States -- worth a read for the bits on immigrants...
What Trump’s Rise Means for Democracy -- typical overblown analysis by pundits surprised by Trump's ascendancy; overthinking the rise of Trump
A warning for parched China: a city runs out of water -- robbing Peter (southern watershed) to pay Paul (northern China)
The Once and Future Superpower: Why China Won’t Overtake the United States -- few understand what it takes to operate carrier groups 5,000 miles from home... or that 600 million very poor people still live in China's forgotten interior.
Pink Floyd; The wall - Oriental version (5:04) (via Lew G.) -- sounds more like a Persian version to me--entertaining...
How not to network a nation--the uneasy history of the Soviet Internet (Benjamin Peters)
Wheat flour versus rice consumption and vascular diseases: Evidence from the China Study II data (via Lew G.) -- academic paper makes a good point about wheat flour--maybe it is merely associated with metabolic syndrome rather than being the cause....
We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it
Pirates, Peasants and Proletarians: For centuries, communes and communal forms of living have inspired people to organize themselves as a revolutionary counter-power to the centralized state.
The dangerous separation of the American upper middle class -- same ground covered by Charles Murray...
Remembering Daniel Berrigan: A Penniless, Powerful Voice for Peace (via Joel M.) -- I saw his brother Philip speak at UH-Manoa in 1972 or 73--a powerful moment I have never forgotten.
If you want to persuade, appeal to interest not to reason.” Ben Franklin
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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