The details of Janis Joplin’s story are now legend: how the bluesy Texas girl unleashed her fury on the San Francisco hippie scene with Big Brother & The Holding Company, bowled over Columbia’s Clive Davis at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, and became the most galvanizing woman in rock. Kris Kristofferson’s “Me And Bobby McGee” wasn’t a typical Joplin song, but her poignant performance, conveying all the battered weariness she must have felt, was all the more gripping for its posthumous success. As an epitaph, both for her and for the excesses of the 1960s, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” will do as well as any.


Janis Joplin The Collection