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Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - Charon - 01-07-2022
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*written by Leonard Cohen for Janis Joplin*
Tragic Turbulent Talent: the Life Story of Janis Joplin
yas! | By Allison Diamond | December 28, 2020
This article was originally published on thewindompeak.com and has been republished here with permission.
Everyone knows that Janis Joplin was the original rock queen and there will never be anyone quite like her. She died tragically young and went on to become a musical icon. But her life was always harrowing and self-destructive. Plagued by drink and drugs, she felt she never fit in and craved approval.
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Today, we’re going to dig deep into her childhood, the bullying, pain, and crippling insecurity she endured, her career, her relationships, and ultimately, her death. So, grab a drink and let's see what made musical maestro Janis Joplin tick.
Southern Belle
Janis Lyn Joplin is best remembered for her Haight-Ashbury years, but did you know she was actually born in the racially-segregated town of Port Arthur, Texas? She came into the world on January 19th, 1943, the first daughter of Dorothy Bonita East (1913–1998), a registrar at a business college and Sunday school teacher, and Seth Ward Joplin (1910–1987), who worked as an engineer for Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura.
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Exceptionally curious and bright, Janis first sang in her church choir when she was just a little girl. Her strict mother expected her to conform to the rules and wear dresses to look like the other little girls. But as she got older, her relationship with her mother became turbulent, often becoming a battle of wills.
Wanted Dead Or Alive!
Her father Seth was an intellectual who enjoyed reading and was much more liberal and tolerant than Dorothy. In a stroke of genius, Seth would take young Janis down to the post office to look at the pictures of wanted men as a form of entertainment! That’s the kind of dad and role model we all wanted. It’s a wonder she didn’t end up dying in a hail of bullets like Bonnie and Clyde!
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What with the mixed messages from her mother’s nagging and high expectations plus her father’s love of outlaws, it’s no wonder Janis became rebellious. She would go on to develop a complete and utter disregard for fitting in, etiquette, convention, the laws of the land, and all that baloney, instead pioneering woman’s liberation, and gender and civil rights.
Rebel Yell
Soon, young Janis started wearing pants and acting like one of the boys, which may go some way to explaining her many masculine qualities and later bisexuality. As a teenager, she loved painting, reading, and writing poetry. As a teenager, she befriended a group of misfits and began listening to and singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School. Remember that school, it’s an important part of Janis’ origin story.
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Despite her artistic ways – always feeling alienated, the lifelong pain that led to her tortured soul, drug use, and singing the blues – she craved her mother’s and her Texas high school peers' approval and validation. Janis spent her whole life torn between being an artistic ne’erdowell while, at the same time, desperately wanting to fit in and be accepted as “normal”.
Little Girl Blue
Poor Janis wasn’t the most popular kid growing up. She recalled she was ostracized and bullied in high school, including by ex-Dallas Cowboys football coach Jimmy Johnson. In her own words, "The whole world turned on me". In her mid-teens, she became overweight and suffered from acne, leaving her with deep scars that required dermabrasion. Her hair was too frizzy and, unlike most of her 1950s Texas school peers, she got along with Black people.
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Fellow students would tease her calling her a freak or a pig. Janis once said, “I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I thought. I didn’t hate Black people.” During her time at the University of Texas, some mean-spirited boys campaigned – and succeeded – to have Joplin named “Ugliest Man on Campus.”
She Dares to be Different
Janis never actually graduated from college, but she attended both Lamar State College of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin. The campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27th, 1962. The headline read “She Dares to Be Different.”
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The article began, "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levis to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin." How cool is that?
Waller Creek Girl
During her time at the University of Texas, Joplin often performed with a folk trio called The Waller Creek Boys. Well, they were boys until they heard Janis' incredible vocals and let her join the band. Perhaps they should have changed their name to The Waller Creek Boys and Girl.
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Joplin styled herself after her favorite blues heroines and the Beat poets. Her first song, "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas student. She herself said, “This is a song called 'What Good Can Drinkin' Do', that I wrote one night after drinkin' myself into a stupor."
Country Road
Joplin left Texas in January 1963 "...just to get away… because my head was in a much different place" and hitchhiked with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco. Soon after, she was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the next two years, her drug use increased and she made a name for herself as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user in the Bay Area.
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If she never left Texas, Janis never would have become the singing legend we know and love today. Or, if she had become a singer, but stayed in Texas, her songs would have been very different. She may have sung “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedez Benz, my friends all ride horses, I must make amends.”
Singing The Blues
Even before she was famous, drugs were taking their toll on this brilliant young woman’s life. Janis and the blues were a match made in heaven. Her songwriting frequently demonstrated trials and tribulations of love, heartbreak, loneliness, alienation, addiction, injustice, hopelessness, and being a down-and-out deadbeat but longing for a better life so often associated with singing the blues.
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In 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a collection of blues songs in San Francisco. One session included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk", "Trouble in Mind", "Kansas City Blues", "Hesitation Blues", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy", and "Long Black Train Blues", and was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape.
You’re Either On The Bus...
By 1965, Joplin’s health was on a rapid downward spiral due to her drug use. She was severely underweight to the point that her friends thought she looked skeletal. They really thought it was best that she go home to recover and hopefully get clean. They even threw her a bus fare party so she could afford the trip back to Texas.
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Back in Port Arthur, Texas in the spring of 1965, her parents grew concerned about her health. She weighed 88 pounds (40kg) but Janis changed her lifestyle for the better. She avoided drugs and alcohol, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar while sporting a beehive hairdo like Amy Winehouse would years later.
A Life More Ordinary
Did you know that in the fall of 1965, Janis got engaged to be married? The man in question was Peter de Blanc, whom she courted toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco. Now living in New York where he worked for IBM Computers, he visited her to ask her father for her hand in marriage. Janis and her mom began planning the wedding but De Blanc, who traveled lots for work, broke off the engagement soon afterward.
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A few years later, Janis stated she had no interest in just being a secretary or being a wife like all the other women she knew at the time. So, while he took another little piece of her heart, it’s actually a good job Peter skedaddled as Janis would never have made music if he stuck with her.
Choose Life
Through 1965 and 1966, Janis had regular therapy sessions with a psychiatric social worker by the name of Bernard Giarritano, also in Beaumont, Texas. Interviewed by biographer Myra Friedman after Janis’ death, he described Janis as “diffused”. Friedman went on to call her “spewing, splattering, splaying all over, without a center to hold…” One of the things that most bothered Janis was how she could possibly have a successful career in music without being tempted back to drugs. Giarritano tried his best to reassure her that she did not have to use drugs to be a successful artist.
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Janis faced the age-old crossroads. Avoid singing professionally by becoming a secretary, and then a wife and mother, like all the other women in Port Arthur… or becoming a singer and risking relapsing into drug use. What would you choose to do? Live a long, comfortable but unfulfilled life as a secretary or live a short life in the fast lane and become a legend?
Leap of Faith
In 1965, Janis recorded seven studio tracks with her acoustic guitar. Among the songs she recorded were her original composition of the song "Turtle Blues" and an alternate version of "Cod'ine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie. You can hear these demo version tracks as they were later released as a new album in 1995, This is Janis Joplin 1965 by James Gurley.
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In 1966, Janis Joplin’s life was about to change forever. She became a secretary. Only kidding… Joplin's raspy, soulful, bluesy vocal style and powerful mezzo-soprano range attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. The band was popular among the hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. The date was June 4th, 1966, and Janis Joplin joined the band she would become world-famous with.
It’s Not What You Know...
Janis had been recruited to Big Brother and the Holding Company by her old friend Chet Helms - the same friend she’d hitchhiked to San Fran with three years prior. In the meantime, he’d become a hot-shot promoter and Big Brother’s manager. Chet sent his friend Travis Rivers to find Janis in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.
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Aware of her previous drug addiction in San Francisco, Helms and Rivers insisted that she inform her parents face-to-face of her plans, and Helms drove her to Port Arthur – waiting outside in his car while she told her mom and dad the good news (and presumably promising them she wouldn’t relapse into drug use) – before they began their long drive to San Francisco, where stardom... and heavy drugs awaited.
Broken Promises
Due to the magical persuasive powers of keyboardist and friend Stephen Ryder, Janis avoided drugs for several weeks. She made Travis Rivers, with whom she shared an apartment in San Francisco, promise that using needles was banned in the house. But when bandmate, drummer Dave Getz, drove her home one night, Travis Rivers was not there, but guests he’d invited were injecting drugs…
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"One of them was about to tie off," recalled drummer Getz. "Janis went nuts! I had never seen anybody explode like that. She was screaming and crying and Travis walked in. She screamed at him: 'We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head and I tried to calm her down. I said, 'They're just doing mescaline,' because that's what I thought it was. She said, 'You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!'”
Debut Album
In July, all five bandmates and guitarist James Gurley's wife Nancy moved to a house in Lagunitas, California. They often partied with fellow psychonauts, The Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis had a short relationship and longer friendship with founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.
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The band traveled to and from Los Angeles to record ten tracks including "Down on Me", "Bye Bye Baby", "Call On Me" and "Coo Coo" between December 12th and 14th, 1966, which appeared on the band's debut album, Big Brother & the Holding Company, released in August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Keep On Truckin’
Journalist Kim France reported in her 1999 New York Times article, "Nothin' Left to Lose", that, "Once she became famous, Joplin cursed like a truck driver, did not believe in wearing undergarments, was rarely seen without her bottle of Southern Comfort and delighted in playing the role of sexual predator."
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Janis was bisexual but, in 1970, once told her old friend Richard Hundgen, the Grateful Dead's San Francisco-based road manager: “I hear a rumor that somebody in San Francisco is spreading stories that I'm a dyke. You go back there and find out who it is and tell them that Janis says she's gotten it on with a couple of thousand cats in her life and a few hundred chicks and see what they can do with that!”
Stardom Beckons
In 1968, Big Brother embarked on an East Coast Tour. On April 7th – three days after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the Wake for Martin Luther King Jr. concert in New York. The band recorded their Live at Winterland '68 album at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco a week later.
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On July 31st, 1968, Joplin hit the big time when she and the band made their first national TV appearance on This Morning with Dick Cavett who, it’s rumored, was among Janis’ long list of lovers! So was Leonard Cohen, by the way. Sometime after releasing their second album, Cheap Thrills, the band became Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The media coverage Janis was receiving ranked her bandmates, who believed their diva was on a star trip. Meanwhile, people were telling Joplin that she ought to dump Big Brother as they were “a terrible band”. Joplin's last performance with Big Brother was at a Chet Helms benefit in San Francisco on December 1st, 1968.
Going Solo
Janis went solo and formed a funky new backing group, the Kozmic Blues Band, which she spelled with a K in honor of Franz Kafka. They comprised of session musicians like keyboardist Stephen Ryder and saxophonist Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers, ex-Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist Sam Andrew, and future Full Tilt Boogie Band bassist Brad Campbell. The Kozmic Blues Band incorporated horns and were funkier, poppier... more influenced by Stax-Volt R&B and soul bands of the 1960s, like Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays compared to Big Brother and the other psychedelic bands around at the time.
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On the surface, her life was going well, but scratch beneath the surface and she was a hot junkie mess. By early 1969, Joplin was shooting $200 worth of heroin a day even though efforts were made to keep her clean during the recording of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Janis had lived in producer Gabriel Mekler’s Los Angeles house during the June 1969 recording sessions at his insistence specifically so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-taking friends.
Sing Sing
In 1969 while performing in Tampa, Florida to a restless crowd, the police asked Joplin if she would help them calm down the crowd. Joplin instead shouted at the police, berating, cursing, and calling them everything under the sun! The funny thing is; it worked! The raucous crowd actually calmed down. Reverse psychology.
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Not unsurprisingly, the cops didn’t particularly like being screamed at so they arrested Janis as soon as the show came to a close. The singer spent the night in Sing Sing but all charges were dropped when the presiding judge decided she was just practicing her freedom of speech. Please note, don’t take that as permission!
Break On Through
In the late 1960s, Janis and Jim Morrison were the queen and king of rock. The Doors’ lead singer was so enamored with Janis he just had to get a date with her. Joplin wasn’t interested, but Morrison wouldn’t take no for an answer. After a party at Hidden Hills in Los Angeles, when Joplin was about to disappear into the night with record producer Paul Rothschild, Morrison allegedly reached into the car and grabbed Janis by her hair, trying to pull her out of the car.
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Joplin reacted instinctively, grabbed a bottle of Southern Comfort, and smashed Morrison across the head with it, sending him sprawling to the ground and knocking him out. Even that wasn’t enough to change Jim’s opinion of her. After the incident, he was quoted as saying, “What a great woman! She’s terrific!” In fact, he seemed all the more obsessed after her heroic stand. Joplin, however, was unimpressed by The Lizard King’s behavior and refused to let Rothschild give Morrison her number. The pair never reconciled.
Woodstock
Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at Woodstock as if it were just another gig. But when she saw the size of the estimated 400,000 crowd from her helicopter taxi, she became unusually anxious. Faced with a ten-hour wait after arriving backstage, she and on-and-off groupie/girlfriend, Peggy Caserta shot heroin and drank alcohol. By the time she went on stage at 2:00 am, she was "three sheets to the wind".
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Her voice was hoarse and she could barely dance but she made it through her set. The audience cheered for an encore, so Janis sang "Ball and Chain". The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend watched her performance and said in his 2012 memoir: "She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn't at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she'd consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible.”
No Photos, Please!
If you’ve been to a music concert this century, you may have noticed a sea of smartphones taking pics and videos. Some performers, like Kate Bush, Bob Dylan, Bjork, and Jack White have even banned people taking photos at their gigs. But Janis was first... kinda.
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A film crew was filming the infamous hippie festival for the famous Woodstock Documentary. But Joplin didn’t feel her performance was good enough to be preserved for future generations and refused to let her set be part of the documentary.
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!
Three weeks after Woodstock, Columbia Records released the album I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! on September 11th, 1969. Containing iconic hits like "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)", "To Love Somebody", and "Little Girl Blue", the LP was poorly reviewed on its initial release, due in part to its shift towards soul/R&B and away from the hard rock/psychedelic sound she was known for with Big Brother.
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Record sales seemed to back up this fact - the public was immediately enamored and the album only made it to number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 but reached number five on the Billboard 200. Sales gained traction and I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! went gold within two months.
Influences
Janis was influenced by a gaggle of extraordinary musicians. From an early age, even before she wanted to be a professional singer, young Janis loved to listen to the blues. Her early favorites included Bessie Smith, Odetta, Big Mama Thornton, Billie Holiday, and iconic American folk and blues musician Leadbelly.
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As her music career progressed, she was influenced by other contemporaneous male and female singers like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Tina Turner. She even got to perform with Tina once, in 1969, when Turner was performing at Madison Square Garden and Joplin joined her on stage.
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Grave News
Joplin often mentioned she was inspired by and felt a kinship with blues singer Bessie Smith (1894–1937). The Empress of the Blues rocked the 1920s and ‘30s jazz era. When Janis found out her favorite singer had been laid to rest in an unmarked grave, she set about making things right. Joplin and Juanita Green, who worked for the Smith family, split the cost of a headstone so fans could finally pay respect to Bessie.
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On August 8th, 1970, as news circulated about her involvement with Smith's new gravestone, Janis performed at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, New York where she sang "Mercedes Benz" for the very first time in public.
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My Friends All Drive Porsches
With that in mind, what car do you think Janis drove? A Mercedez Benz, right? Wrong; after seeing a Porsche navigating the streets of San Francisco, she bought a 1964 Porsche 356 C Cabriolet in Beverly Hills. Her roadie Dave Richards did the paint job. After she died, the Porsche was found parked in the garage of the Hollywood hotel where she passed; her family took ownership and returned the car to its original Dolphin Gray color. Through extensive photographic records, the car was eventually returned to her bright colors.
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After spending 20 years on the main floor of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the car was finally sold at auction in 2015. The initial estimate was $400,000 to $600,000 but Janis’ Porsche 365 was sold for a whopping $1.76 million. Hopefully, the auctioneer told the winning bidder: "You know you've got it, and we hope it makes you feel good".
Falling Off the Wagon
By early 1970, it was obvious her heroin abuse and heavy drinking began adversely affecting her music. In February, Joplin traveled to Brazil. Amazingly, she quit her heroin and alcohol addiction and started a relationship with clean-cut drug-free backpacker David Niehaus. The couple was photographed at Rio di Janiero Carnival looking “like a carefree, happy, healthy young couple having a tremendously good time."
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When Joplin returned to the U.S., she began hanging around with on-again-off-again junkie girlfriend Peggy Caserta and started using heroin again. Niehaus caught her shooting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California, and ended the relationship. Just before they broke up, Niehaus had wanted Janis to take some time off to travel the world with him. Who knows, if she did, she might still be alive.
Full Tilt Boogie
Realizing that the Kozmic Blues band was not working, Janis also left this band, and in the last year of her life formed her final band... known for a short time as Main Squeeze, before they settled on the name Full Tilt Boogie. For a while, Janis was much happier, her new band was well-received by fans and critics alike but it wouldn't last.
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Around this time, she met Kris Kristofferson; who would eventually become her lover and who also wrote her hit, "Me and Bobby McGee". During these last few months of her life, Janis began calling herself "Pearl" which, to her, represented the tough-talking, highly sexed, hedonistic, Southern Comfort swigging, truck driver side of her nature.
High School Reunion
Appearing on the Dick Cavett Show, Janis announced her plans to attend her high school reunion on August 14th, 1970. Now, this may sound like a mere trifle, some fluff to fill time on the chat show. But this reunion was hugely important to Janis. She told Cavett that during her time at high school in Port Arthur that her classmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state, man".
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Janis wanted to return to Texas to sock it to those who had bullied and ostracized her. She wanted to show them that she had made it after all. She might have had the fame and fortune but the truth was, her fragile inner child still craved acceptance from her hometown. Janis spent the reunion drunk and – having made several disparaging remarks about the town in the national press – didn’t exactly rub the townsfolks’ noses in it as she’d hoped. Not for the first time, she left Port Arthur feeling rejected, unapproved and unloved.
The Wrong Crowd
Upon returning to San Francisco, Janis's heroin usage increased significantly. In July 1970, she met Seth Morgan; a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, coke dealer, and future novelist from a wealthy East Coast family. He assured Janis he was not after her money, and even signed an agreement to say so. Seth was one of the popular boys Janis had always sought approval from. He also happened to share Janis’ father’s name – read into that what you will. He also went on to become a Tony Danza lookalike.
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Perhaps trying to deal with the feelings of inferiority that her disastrous high school reunion brought to the surface, this was her final attempt at finding the belonging and a more ordinary life that she so desperately craved. Janis and Morgan were engaged to be married in early September.
A Woman Left Lonely
Janis had been living in the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood while she recorded her Pearl album. Meanwhile, her fiancee Seth had been staying at Janis’ Larkspur home. Despite making a pact to stay away from each other, Joplin begged Peggy Caserta for heroin, and when Caserta refused to provide it, Joplin admonished her; saying, "Don't think if you can get it, I can't get it.” Within a week, Joplin was a regular customer of Caserta’s heroin dealer.
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Janis recorded "Mercedes Benz" on October 1st, 1970. It was the last recording she ever made. On the same day, she changed her will. On Saturday, October 3rd – saddened that both Peggy and Seth failed to show up at the Landmark as planned the previous night – she visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song "Buried Alive in the Blues", which the band had recorded earlier that day for the Pearl album. The track was great. Janis was on a high and producer Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day.
Bad News
The rumor was that Janis and Seth had been planning their wedding, but on that same Saturday, Joplin discovered by telephone that Seth had met other women at a Marin County restaurant, and invited them back to party at her home. She must have been devastated.
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Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie Band keyboardist Ken Pearson left Sunset Sound Recorders together and she drove him and a male fan in her Porsche to Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood where she drank two vodka and oranges. As Joplin and Pearson pulled up to the Landmark Motel, she expressed her fears that he and the other Full Tilt Boogie musicians might stop making music with her. Aside from the night shift desk clerk, Pearson was the last person to ever see Janis Joplin alive.
Tragedy Strikes
In the late afternoon of Sunday, October 4th, 1970, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned when Joplin failed to show up at Sunset Sound Recorders. In the evening, he phoned the Landmark Motor Hotel and reached Full Tilt Boogie's road manager, John Cooke, who was also staying there...
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Rothchild expressed his worries that Janis hadn't shown up to the studio and asked Cooke to search for her. Cooke and two of his friends noticed her psychedelic Porsche in the hotel parking lot... but when he entered her room, John Cooke found his friend's’ lifeless body on the floor beside her bed. Janis Joplin was dead aged 27.
Post Mortem
Newspapers reported that no drugs or paraphernalia were found in the room but, according to a 1983 book by Joseph DiMona and Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, evidence of narcotics was removed from the scene by a friend and later replaced after that person realized an autopsy would reveal narcotics were in her system.
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The autopsy determined the cause of death was a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol. John Cooke believed she had been supplied with much stronger heroin than she was used to, as indicated by overdoses of several of her dealer's other customers during the same weekend. Though she was upset, let down, and low, her rampant alcohol and her heroin consumption set her on an almost inevitable collision course with meeting her maker, Janis’ death was ruled accidental, not suicide.
Falling on the Needle
Janis Joplin's former love interest, Peggy Caserta, was apparently blamed for the death. Caserta denied responsibility and instead said that Joplin died by "tripping and falling." Caserta even went as far as to say that it wasn't heroin that killed the singer, but rather "a lifelong battle with clumsiness." She continued, "She tripped and fell, honey. I'm positive of it."
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After Caserta's Going Down With Janis was published, it was mentioned that the person who supplied Caserta with heroin was the same dealer who supplied Joplin with her last amount. Out of revenge, the dealer nearly killed Caserta's former girlfriend, Kim Chappell.
Putting the Fun in Funeral
Joplin didn’t want a big fussy funeral. In fact, in her will, she left her friends and family $2,500 to throw a wake party, which was held at The Lion’s Share in San Anselmo, California on October 26th, 1970. According to party-goers, everyone got as drunk as possible, which might have been the best way to honor their beloved friend.
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Her funeral service was much more understated. Somewhat surprisingly, only three people attended: her parents and her aunt. Her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean along Stinson Beach, Marin County, California.
Lost Love Letter
Around the time of her death, Joplin’s ex-boyfriend, David Niehaus – who had helped get her off the drugs – had sent her a telegram containing the words, “Love you Mama, more than you know…” Heartbreakingly, the telegram never reached her.
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Despite the fact he ended their relationship when she started on the heroin again, it seemed Niehaus still had feelings for Janis. If only that telegram had arrived a few days earlier, it might have turned out to be a happier ending.
The 27 Club
Janis became one of the founding members of the prestigious 27 Club; a group of artists – usually musicians – who died tragically at the tender age of 27. Janis died only weeks after Jimi Hendrix died of a drug overdose aged 27 on 18th September 1970. Less than a year after Joplin’s death, Jim Morrison lead singer of The Doors was also found dead, at the same age... again by the foul hand of narcotics.
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The Lizard King died two years to the day after The Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones died aged 27. Three years after Jim passed, his girlfriend Pamela Courson also died at the age of 27. The 27 Club includes more recent members like Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.
Big Shoes To Fill
While several biopics about Janis have been rumored to be in the pipeline, none have actually made it to production. Over the years, many actresses have been ready to play Joplin including Courtney Love, Reese Witherspoon, Zooey Deschanel, Renee Zellweger, Laura Theodore, Lili Taylor, Brittany Murphy, and singer Melissa Etheridge to name but a few!
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A couple of years back, two rival Janis biopics were close to being greenlit. They were to star Amy Adams and Michelle Williams respectively. Amy's movie got canceled so – while all is quiet on the Western Front for now – we're counting on you, Michelle!
Legacy
Joplin completed her Pearl album before her death, but it wasn’t released until after she died. She never knew it went on to be her best-selling album, nor did she know that her song "Me and Bobby McGee" would become her first number one song.
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In the years since she died, 18.5 million albums have been sold and she finally received the recognition she deserved. Just a few of the female recording artists she’s inspired include Juliette Lewis, Joan Jett, Alicia Keys, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, and P!nk. In 1995, 25 years after her death, Janis was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2013, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her brother and sister, Michael and Laura attended the ceremony.
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - IceWizard - 01-07-2022
Tragic story of a remarkable life...
She died too early, she was loved by so many and left
a trove of great music...
As was stated, her High School said seh was the “Ugliest Man on Campus.”,
she could not get anyone to take her to the HS prom ... Sad ...
We still remember you Janis ... You are forever in our hearts
Ice
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - TrayGold - 01-07-2022
Charon, thanks for starting this thread. We definitely need something non political and non COVID.
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - Charon - 01-09-2022
hxxps://electricliterature.com/go-ask-alice-hoax-teen-anxiety-drugs/
GO ASK ALICE WAS FICTION TO MESS WITH TEENS. AND IT AFFECTED MANY OF US DEEPLY. WTH?
I know drugs were a massive problem for a few yrs in the wealthy area in which i used to live. And we all kept journals. This was a book one read to understand the writer as one read the Diary of Anne Frank. I was offered a writing scholarship to a writers college in tenth grade. I would not do it as i planned to practice law with me father, and i was terrified i would not be the top student in the class when all else were older. And i don't follow rules and regs too well. I paid for six colleges.
It was a classic. We all kept journals that we hoped to publish some day. It was part of the fun and adventures of the era. I cannot believe it was written by a youth counselor for some church. Buggary bollocks.
It helped many of us believe we could write. It was giving up meds. And we all thought some angry dealers/ friends?? poisoned her. Well thanks alot for that trauma to bear u rat bastardz. We are not a science experiment.
The Book That Defined My Teen Anxiety Turned Out to Be a Lie
The sobering message of "Go Ask Alice" had a huge effect on my life—and then I found out the real story
Empty Alice in Wonderland dress
Photo by Birgit Compton on Wikimedia Commons
MAY 22, 2019
SLOANE TANEN
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Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that changed your mind?
My older sister never let me in her room. In 1982, I loved her as much as she loathed me. My mother had a no-closed-door policy, so I spent many an hour staring at my sister from the doorframe in the hallway, like she was a fish in an aquarium. I watched her reading, listening to music, talking on her transparent Lucite rotary phone with the curly cord. She glared at me occasionally, asked me why I was such a loser, but mostly she did a superb job of pretending I didn’t exist.
And then she went to boarding school. I didn’t know why she went, though I doubted it was in pursuit of a better education. She’d gotten into some sort of trouble for something (my imagination went wild with possibilities), but anyway she was suddenly gone and there was nobody to bar me from entering the kingdom of cool. The day she left I stretched myself out on her bed, wondering whether anyone would notice if I took her fleece comforter until she came home. I studied the Polaroids of my sister with her long-legged friends and the Pink Floyd posters taped to the ceiling. I thought about how fun it was going to be to try on the clothes she hadn’t packed: the striped Guess jeans, the strappy wedges and a satin Fiorrucci jacket I couldn’t believe she’d left behind. I went through her drawers collecting rubber bands, stale lip-gloss, a cracked tub of Nozxema, and old Interview Magazines. And then, almost as an afterthought, I went to her bookshelf.
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
As with most of the things in my sister’s room, I didn’t know how she’d acquired the much-thumbed book with the dark and creepy cover of a heavily shadowed, blurry face. I couldn’t even make out if the face belonged to a girl or a boy. The strangest part was that there was no author. Under the provocative title, Go Ask Alice, was the word “Anonymous.” What did that mean? Go ask Alice what? I wondered. The phrase had a note of nostalgia to it, as if I’d overheard it somewhere. Like the marijuana box in my mother’s vanity or the occasional tampons in the little garbage can next to the toilet, the book belonged to the realm of things not meant for me to see.
I took the book (and the comforter) back to my powder blue room and planted myself on the side of my bed that offered the most privacy in our open-door house. And I read the book, which turned out to be a “real diary” of a teenage girl who becomes addicted to drugs at age 15 and runs away from home. The unnamed teenage protagonist had a familiar voice; she was smart and popular and she sounded like my sister when she was in a good mood. Happening upon that anonymous diary felt like a great discovery. I moved through the pages rapt, feeling sophisticated in my new acquaintance with boys, sex, and drinking.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the tone of the book began to change. Anonymous, it turned out, had been drugged at a party and was now, accidentally, addicted to drugs! Her voice grew more absent, detached, as if she was being gradually unplugged. I turned the pages quickly now, guilty and thrilled that I had a front row seat to her private tragedy. Mostly I was shocked that something so terrible could happen to someone so normal, someone like me. I kept waiting for her to get better, to let her family help, but unlike the after school specials I’d grown up on, this narrative felt shapeless, as if to suggest that in real life no story arc existed, no moral compass at all. Just when I couldn’t stand the tension any longer, the diarist’s tone lightened and it seemed everything was going to be okay. I cheered, felt a visceral relief, before I realized I’d been mistaken. Instead of the happy ending I anticipated, the diary just stopped.I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the epilogue: The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary.
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I was shocked that something so terrible could happen to someone so normal, someone like me.
I read the book again before returning everything to my sister’s room (even the comforter) and deciding the world was a very dangerous place. I cried for a long time after that because, in my mind, everything had changed. I was worried about my sister, I was worried about growing up, and, most of all, I became terrified of social gatherings. I swore to myself that I would never do drugs and that, if I happened to find myself at a party by mistake, I would never accept a drink from a stranger. I vowed that if I ever took drugs “by accident,” I would check myself into a rehab facility immediately to avoid any possibility of addiction. Only a twelve-year-old neurotic could rationalize such thinking, but it felt very real at the time.
I clearly wouldn’t have been so susceptible to the horrors of Go Ask Alice had I not had an appetite for anxiety to begin with. Still, the book haunted me through my adolescence and beyond. As I grew up in Los Angeles, my worldly friends were confused by my abstinence, my prudishness. But any temptation was trumped by that epilogue, running like a Gloria Gaynor song in my head: The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary. To this day, I’ve never been a real drinker, never indulged in drugs beyond weed. Refraining from drugs isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I was acting out of fear, not prudence. Go Ask Alice cemented my childhood suspicions about the perils of losing control. I even stopped dancing for fear that somebody might spike my punch while I was doing the Reebok. (Really.) Anonymous had convinced me that if I didn’t keep a tight watch, bad things were inevitably going to happen. I’d wept for that dead girl, but at least she hadn’t died in vain. She’d convinced me (and, I’d imagine, lots of other teenagers) to walk the straight and narrow.
And then, at the age of 47, I happened upon an article in The Paris Review about Go Ask Alice. The author, Frankie Thomas, describes the four stages of experience in reading the 1971 classic. First, the “titillated horror … at the book’s dramatic depictions of drug use.” Check. I definitely experienced that. Second, the “creeping suspicion” that there’s “something fishy” about a homeless drug addict keeping a diary fit for publication. Hmmm. I hadn’t really given it much thought at the time. Third, “the revelation, for the adult reader, that Go Ask Alice is not, in fact, a ‘real diary’ but a fictional hoax written by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks.” What’s that? Beatrice Sparks also penned Jay’s Journal, the “real diary” of a boy that died after getting involved with Satanism and It Happened To Nancy, yet another “real diary” of a girl, who got date-raped, got AIDS and died! What the fuck? Thomas describes the last stage of reading Go Ask Alice as a “howling hilarity upon rereading the book in this context.” Seen through this lens, according to Thomas, the book is basically a comedy.
Was I the only adult who didn’t know the truth? How was this even possible?
Well, I didn’t think it was funny. I was furious. Was I the only adult who didn’t know the truth? How was this even possible? I’m not an idiot. I’m a voracious reader; I went to college, grad school even. Is it really conceivable that a cheesy bit of anti-drug propaganda camp changed me into the fearful person I am today? Was I—am I—that susceptible, that naïve? Christ.
Many books have influenced my life and how I think, but very few have altered my sense of reality. In retrospect, I can see that reading Go Ask Alice at that particular stage of my adolescence had a profound effect on the person I became. I never blamed the book for fueling my anxieties—those wheels were clearly already in motion—but I do wonder if I might have moved through life with less useless armor had I not been so paranoid about becoming a victim, so concerned with what other people thought of me, so overly prepared to reject anyone who I thought might reject me first. Anonymous might have used drugs to escape her adolescent worries, but I would never be so foolish. My pre-teen mind equated letting go with putting myself in danger. My adult mind settled into those grooves and took refuge in their worn familiarity.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that I’ve always been drawn to novels with unreliable narrators; The Talented Mr. Ripley, What Was She Thinking, The Dinner, Fingersmith, Good Behavior. I find nothing more satisfying than being escorted through a story by someone I’m not sure I can trust. It feels like the most honest form of storytelling. After all, aren’t we all just the unreliable narrators of our own stories? And fiction, by definition, is a fabrication. But nobody enjoys being outright lied to, being made to feel duped. As I see it, Beatrice Sparks lied to me.
I think about James Frey’s public flaying over A Million Little Pieces, a purported addiction memoir which was later revealed to be a literary fraud, and wonder how Mrs. Sparks got off without ever having to answer for her trickery. I recently looked up Go Ask Alice on Amazon. The author is still listed as “Anonymous,” and it really isn’t manifestly obvious, as it should be, that Go Ask Alice is a work of fiction. In fact, the editorial review reads as follows: Although there is still some question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, there is no question that it has made a profound impact on millions of readers during the more than 25 years it has been in print. Maybe nobody who happens upon the book is as naïve as I was at twelve, or maybe the value of the faux memoir now lies in its conceit rather than its message. Whatever the case, the deception still rankles, even after all these years.
Going from Cocaine to Novels, with the Help of “Novel with Cocaine”
This mysterious Russian fictionalized drug memoir spurred me to rethink my past—and write a new kind of character
APR 23 – E.P. FLOYD
NOVEL GAZINGLines of white powder on a mirror
So should I be angry with Beatrice Sparks, or grateful? Did she save me from the horrors of addiction or prevent me from partaking in the normal, feel-good experimentation my peers enjoyed? I think about the “trips” I didn’t take, the drinks I didn’t drink, the fun I didn’t have. I’m delighted not to find myself a 48-year-old drug addict, but God knows I could have used some lightening up along the way.
When I called my friend Kelly to discuss my revelations about Go Ask Alice—Kelly is the self-deprecating friend I rely on to temper my personal humiliations with her reliably more outrageous gaffes—she wanted to know if I was joking. Of course she knew Go Ask Alice was a fake. Everybody knew. Who does LSD and then marijuana, she asked, as if I’d read the book for veracity at the ripe age of thirteen. She told me that she started doing drugs after she read the book, that’s how amusing the read was for her. I suspect she was exaggerating, but that’s not the point. At least, like most of my friends, Kelly knows how to have a good time—which, thanks to a Mormon youth counselor in Utah, is more than I can say.
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - Charon - 01-09-2022
hxxps://www.grunge.com/188499/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-amy-winehouse/
If you've ever heard Amy Winehouse sing, there's a good chance you can hear her voice in your head whenever her name is mentioned. Winehouse's extraordinary, powerful contralto was so unique that Classic FM tells us the legendary Tony Bennett once described her as "one of the finest jazz singers he'd ever heard," and classic soprano Catherine Bott has said she's "one of those voices that's instantly recognizable." The artist's songs certainly matched her pipes and her distinctive image. From "Back to Black" and "Tears Dry on Their Own" to her feisty yet tragic signature tune, "Rehab," her musical output was full of soul and esteemed by both professionals and the public.
Unfortunately, talented as she was, Winehouse's private life was as troubled as her music game was strong. She was haunted by personal demons and the tabloid press alike, and as her fame rose, her life started an intense downward spiral that she was ultimately unable to correct before it was too late. Today, we take a look at one of the most heartbreaking members of the "27 Club." This is the tragic real-life story of Amy Winehouse.
AMY WINEHOUSE'S EARLY TROUBLES
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Amy Winehouse was talented at a young age, but unfortunately, the first signs of the various troubles that would plague her adulthood were also present. As The Guardian and Biography tell us, Winehouse was born in 1983 to cab driver Mitch Winehouse and pharmacist Janis Winehouse, and her childhood was full of music due to the family being full of jazz musicians. She was exposed to many different musical styles, and by the time she was ten, she was even a part of a Salt-N-Pepa-influenced rap band, Sweet 'n Sour.
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In 1996, a 12-year-old Winehouse managed to get a place at the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School. However, she was kicked out at 16. It appears that her rebellious streak may have been raising its head by this point, as the reason for expulsion was that young Winehouse was "not applying herself" and ... uh, had dared to pierce her nose. To be fair, if she got trouble for that, the school doesn't really sound like the best place for an aspiring pop star, especially one with Winehouse's aesthetic leanings.
AMY WINEHOUSE LOST HER ANCHOR
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Amy Winehouse was a huge fan of body ink, and one of her most prominent tattoos was an arm piece picturing a crude pin-up girl surrounded with hearts and the text "Cynthia." As Birmingham Mail tells us, this wasn't just some random walk-in piece. It's a special tribute to Winehouse's grandmother, Cynthia, and she designed it in collaboration with tattoo artist Henry Hate, who made the deliberately crude piece with zero idea that it would soon become one of the most recognizable tattoo designs in the world. Hate gets the occasional request to tattoo the same design on other people, but he always refuses out of respect to Winehouse and the tattoo's original meaning.
Winehouse was extremely close with her grandmother, who was also a singer and highly supportive of her granddaughter's artistic aspirations. According to NME, Winehouse's first manager, Nick Shymansky, considered Cynthia to be the singer's "guardian," and both he and Winehouse's father believe that Cynthia's death was the event that triggered the artist's downward spiral.
SHE REALLY TRIED TO SAY 'YES' TO REHAB
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Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" is notorious for its defiant chorus, which states, "They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, no, no, no." The lyrics then comment that the singer's dad thinks she's fine, so whoever's trying to make her spend a stint in residential rehabilitation has another thing coming. These lines are based on a real incident.
As NME and Deutsche Welle tell us, Winehouse's substance abuse started to spiral out of control around the time her grandmother became deathly ill in early 2005. What's more, the bulimia she'd quietly struggled with as a teen made a comeback. All of this — along with a dash of relationship drama with on-again, off-again boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil — made things so bad that her manager, Nick Shymansky, tried his best to convince Winehouse to go to rehab and sort things out.
She was fine with the idea, and everything was in order, but she wanted her father to back up her attempt to get sober. And Mitch Winehouse promised Shymansky to tell his daughter that the rehab plan was great, but when he actually saw her ... well, you know how the song goes. This incident has been described as Winehouse's last real chance of tackling her issues before becoming a sought-after superstar made it doubly more difficult. And while The Guardian tells us she eventually did give rehab a shot in 2008, it obviously turned out to be too late.
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SHE WAS IN A ROUGH RELATIONSHIP
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As The Daily Beast tells us, Amy Winehouse had a famous — and famously turbulent — love affair with Blake Fielder-Civil. They started dating in 2005, which also marked the start of Winehouse's metamorphosis from the comparatively conventional look of her jazzy Frank era to her famous tattoos, winged eyeliner and beehive hairdo. Fielder-Civil fully admits he was the one who introduced the singer to "heroin, crack cocaine, and self-harming," and though he's said he feels "more than guilty," it didn't make the pair's relationship any less difficult. They broke up, got together, and broke up again. They got married and had a divorce. At least once, they fought so badly that they were reportedly "covered with blood and bruises." Oh, and at the time Winehouse made her breakthrough and rose to the upper echelons of pop, Fielder-Civil was in prison for assault. When she died in 2011, he was in prison again, this time for attempted robbery and possession of a fake gun.
Yet despite the red flags that were scattered liberally around their entire relationship, Winehouse always seemed to consider Fielder-Civil as something of a muse. Even during his worst troubles, she showed public support for him several times, and she famously boasted a tattoo of a pocket that said "Blake's" near her heart.
AMY WINEHOUSE'S TROUBLES WITH THE LAW
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Amy Winehouse did more than her share of walking on the wild side, so it's not exactly a shock that she had a few run-ins with the police over the years. A lot of this unwelcome attention from the officials seems to have coincided with the turbulent years after Back to Black exploded and propelled her to superstardom, and tragically, it all seems to be in connection with her issues with substance abuse. The Guardian reports that in 2007, Winehouse was arrested in Norway and spent the night in custody for cannabis possession. CNN notes that this wasn't her only arrest that year, as she was also briefly arrested due to "a case involving her husband," Blake Fielder-Civil.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Winehouse's troubles with the law continued in 2008, when she was arrested for allegedly assaulting someone outside a bar in London. As The Guardian tells us, there was another assault allegation against her that year, along with an incident that saw her arrested for "alleged drug offenses."
AMY WINEHOUSE'S STRUGGLE WITH ADDICTION
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Everyone who's even passingly familiar with Amy Winehouse's story knows that its arguably most tragic aspect was her long-running struggle with addiction. According to Deutsche Welle, Winehouse started drinking heavily around the time she gained notoriety, possibly as a method to deal with the pressures of fame. She met her future ex-husband and noted heroin addict Blake Fielder-Civil during one of her nights out, and eventually, her excesses started involving drugs as well.
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By 2009, Winehouse's addictions started to severely affect both her voice and her career, and she was known to appear visibly drunk on stage. The crowds started booing and concerts were canceled, and though Winehouse's representatives attributed these bumps in the road to "health reasons," her troubles with alcohol were obvious to pretty much everyone. Unfortunately, she was unable to correct the course. While The Guardian tells us that in 2008, she finally made that much-needed trip to rehab she so resisted in her most famous song, the effects didn't last. It was alcohol that ultimately killed her in 2011, at just 27 years old.
THE BRAIN DAMAGE THEORY
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On paper, Amy Winehouse's tragic tale of fame, addiction, and early death seems like a fairly straightforward story, but there just might be more to the tale than we know. Asif Kapadia, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary Amy, thinks that the artist may have suffered from brain damage that, as he put it, prevented her from "thinking straight."
Kapadia bases his theory on a claim that Winehouse had a number of overdoses and seizures during her years of substance abuse, but he's not the first person to speculate on the potential damage to the singer's brain. In 2008, Welt reported that medical professionals had warned Winehouse that another drug binge might actually kill her and that several doctors were genuinely concerned that the vast amount of drugs she was taking could leave her with brain damage. Then again, the media wrote all sorts of less than delightful things about the poor singer at the time, so who knows what the truth is?
THE SINGER HAD SOME VIOLENT TENDENCIES
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Amy Winehouse might not come across as a particularly violent person, unless you count her tragically famous self-destructive tendencies. Even so, there was a dark period of her life where she garnered unfortunate attention for (allegedly) assaulting multiple fans. According to CNN, when Winehouse performed in front of 80,000 people at the Glastonbury Festival in 2008, she allegedly punched someone in the front row. In all fairness, it must be noted that the festival's organizer said she did this because said someone had grabbed her breasts, which, as you know, is a huge no-no.
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However, this wasn't Winehouse's last reported punching incident. In 2009, The Guardian wrote that the singer was in court for allegedly punching a dancer in the eye at the backstage of a summer ball after said dancer had asked for a selfie with her. Later that year, Rolling Stone reported that Winehouse attacked a theater owner who was trying to stop her from making a scene at a performance of Cinderella.
TABLOID TROUBLES
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It's probably fair to say that most British celebrities of note have to struggle with unwanted attention from the country's tabloids at some point in their careers. However, as NPR notes, Amy Winehouse had to play the yellow press game on hard mode. Much of this was because the media field was shifting at the time, and as a troubled famous person with the occasional public meltdown in an era when things like YouTube and Facebook were starting to really hit it big, she was in the worst possible place at the worst possible time when it came to unwanted media attention.
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People couldn't get enough of the whole "celebrity having difficulties" thing that Winehouse pretty much introduced to the digital age, and because her face attached to a cover story was basically a license to print money, she was constantly hounded by the paparazzi. Asif Kapadia, director of the documentary Amy, says that the singer was essentially trapped in a situation where almost everybody close to her had a media deal of some sort, leaving everyone looking out for their own interests and her "getting more and more lost" in the middle of it all.
THE DISASTROUS COMEBACK TOUR
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Some artists seem completely doomed, and their career seems dead in the water. Then, they unexpectedly get their act together and re-emerge in a glorious comeback that reminds everyone of their talent and glory. Unfortunately, not everyone can pull a Robert Downey Jr. because it requires the artist to actually have spent some time wrestling their demons into submission. As The Guardian reports, Amy Winehouse certainly hadn't accomplished this when she embarked on her comeback tour in 2011, and as a result, her phoenix didn't so much rise from the ashes as it completely failed to ignite and settled to roll in the ashes some more.
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Winehouse had largely avoided the stage for the previous two years, so her European tour had all the makings of a grand comeback. But when she entered the stage in Belgrade, Serbia, it was soon evident this comeback was anything but glorious. It was, however, a painful demonstration that her addiction issues were far from behind her. Winehouse randomly stopped a song halfway through to introduce the band, only to barely remember their names. She suddenly made a freaked-out backup dancer to take over the vocals on "Valerie." She randomly decided to remove a shoe. All in all, the media considered the concert the worst in Belgrade's history, and even the country's minister of defense calling it "a huge shame and a disappointment." The rest of the tour was promptly canceled.
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THE DEATH OF AMY WINEHOUSE
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After years of excruciatingly public struggles with drugs, alcohol and seemingly every bad thing they could happen to a person, Amy Winehouse's life came to an end on July 23, 2011. Winehouse was only 27 years old when she died, and her cause of death was "accidental alcohol poisoning." According to The Guardian, she'd developed a pattern where she stayed sober for weeks, then fell off the wagon with a drinking binge. Evidently, her body simply couldn't handle her last binge anymore. As a result, she was found lifeless in her room the next morning, with a staggering blood alcohol level of 0.416 at the time of death.
It should be stated that we can actually be pretty sure about the "accidental" part in her cause of death. As TNT Magazine reports, Winehouse specifically told her doctor shortly before her death that she didn't wish to die, and that she was "looking forward to the future." Unfortunately for her, the future never came.
AMY WINEHOUSE STRUGGLED WITH AN EATING DISORDER
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What really killed Amy Winehouse? According to The Guardian, her untimely demise in 2011 was ruled "death by misadventure" due to drinking so much alcohol that it poisoned her. However, her brother, Alex Winehouse, put forward an alternate theory in 2013. He doesn't exactly contest the coroner or anything, and he fully admits that his famous sister's vast drug and alcohol levels did no favors to her lifespan. However, Alex feels that the thing that contributed most to Amy's extremely untimely death was an eating disorder rather than narcotic substances.
Amy Winehouse struggled with bulimia for years, and her brother feels that her physique was significantly weakened by the periods of extreme overeating and the following bouts of self-imposed vomiting and depression that are typical of the condition. Alex Winehouse says that the condition stemmed from the singer's teenage years, when she had a group of friends who would all "put loads of rich sauces on their food, scarf it down, and throw it up." He says that most of them eventually stopped, but the condition stuck with his sister, and since she wasn't prepared to really talk about it, her eating disorder was a pretty hard issue to bring up. Still, Alex — who co-runs the Amy Winehouse Foundation in his sister's honor — decided to breach the subject after his sister's death in order to raise awareness for the condition.
Read More: hxxps://www.grunge.com/128712/janis-joplins-tragic-real-life-story/?utm_campaign=clip
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Stronger Than Me
Song by Amy Winehouse
Overview
Listen
Lyrics
Lyrics
You should be Stronger Than Me
You been here seven years longer than me
Don't you know you supposed to be the man
Not pale in comparison to who you think I am
You always wanna talk it through, I don't care!
I always have to comfort you when I'm there
But that's what I need you to do, stroke my hair!
'Cause I've forgotten all of young love's joy
Feel like a lady, and you my lady boy
You should be Stronger Than Me
But instead you're longer than frozen turkey
Why'd you always put me in control?
All I need is for my man to live up to his role
Always wanna talk it through, I'm ok
Always have to comfort you every day
But that's what I need you to do, are you gay?
'Cause I've forgotten all of young love's joy
Feel like a lady, and you my lady boy
He said "The respect I made you earn
Thought you had so many lessons to learn"
I said "You don't know what love is, get a grip!"
Sounds as if you're reading from some other tired script
I'm not gonna meet your mother anytime
I just wanna grip your body over mine
Please, tell me why you think that's a crime
I've forgotten all of young love's joy
Feel like a lady, and you my lady boy
You should be Stronger Than Me
You should be Stronger Than Me
You should be Stronger Than Me
You should be Stronger Than Me
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - Charon - 01-09-2022
Had to throw in Doors. Just a couple.
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - Charon - 01-12-2022
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - IceWizard - 01-13-2022
Somebody got a new sled for Christmas
![[Image: 96zOOGN.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/96zOOGN.gif)
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - IceWizard - 01-13-2022
The very reason a Dash Cam is
Necessary Equipment these days
![[Image: pOoU403.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/pOoU403.gif)
Necessary Equipment these days
RE: Anything non political. Not the Jab. Calm... - Charon - 01-13-2022
woah. bad people suck. if they can be clever enuff to work out a scam accident for monies, why cannot they take a job delivering pizza or stocking amazon?