Janis Joplin & Jorma Kaukonen’s ‘The Legendary Typewriter Tape' will be Release on Record Store Day

By editorial board on November 18, 2022

For Record Store Day this year, Omnivore Recordings is set to release the formative album by Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen, known as The Legendary Typewriter Tape: 6/25/64 Jorma’s House. LP release date: November 24, 2022.

 

Featuring Joplin originals, as well as blues classics, The Legendary Typewriter Tape is, according to a press statement, “an intimate glimpse into two major artists at the beginnings of what would become highly influential careers. As Jorma says in his liner notes, ‘This is indeed a window into a simpler time when the music truly was everything.'”

Available on CD and digital on December 2, the release will also be available on vinyl exclusively for Record Store Day Black Friday (November 25).

“Kaukonen (later of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna) met a singer named Janis Joplin at a hootenanny in San Jose, California, in the fall of 1962. Over the following years, Janis would call on Jorma to accompany her at gigs,” the statement continued. “As they continued to play together, the Bay Area was changing musically and developing into the legendary San Francisco scene to which both Janis and Jorma would be integral. (Americansongwriter)

The "beatnik from Port Arthur, Texas" set a new high bar for uninhibited powerful, blues-driven songs. Unleashing raw talent on a still poodle-skirted US exploring rock and roll, Joplin went "Full Tilt Boogie" with a full repertoire of blues, folk, and R&B following her rocky start in San Francisco in the hippie neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Joplin was a fiercely conflicted young woman, dying at the age of twenty-seven of a heroin overdose.

School was not kind to Janis, deeply wounding her and sealing that mutinous daughter apart from her peers and parents. She was always different, more one of the boys than friends and it was easy for her to discover an escape into music...and booze...and drugs...and sex.

It was after the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, that she would become a national star. The author did an amazing job with researching, interviewing and tracing letters home that provide the rocky road on which Janis traveled. The extreme highs and lows. George-Warren relates the anguish with which she desperately clung to threads of approval and drowned disappointment.

In this documentary, Janis Joplin  helps you to truly understand the celebrated and rock/soul singer who died in 1970, aged just 27, even if you think you already knew everything about her and her short career.

According with BBC Music this is  not only to consider biography, but, through exhaustive research and incredible access to family members, friends and former band-mates, paint an almost psychological portrait of Janis Joplin, an intensely complex and brilliant person.

Here, then, are a few things you may not know about her, some taken from the film, and some we dug up from

 She was driven by a constant need to please her parents

Perhaps Berg's biggest scoop with Little Girl Blue was being given permission to use Janis's letters as source material for the film, and particularly revelatory are the many she sent back to her family in Port Arthur, Texas, where she grew up. At every point in her career, you sense this desperate need to impress her parents, and justify her choices in life. "Weak as it is, I apologise for being just so plain bad in the family," she wrote after leaving for San Francisco to follow her dreams. And yet her parents were largely supportive, although worried, especially about her drug use. In the film, Janis's sister reveals that their parents once considered whether their failings as parents had "caused a calamity".

 

She paid for a tombstone to be erected at the grave of her hero, Bessie Smith

Janis had plenty of heroes from the history of music - Odetta, Billie Holiday, Otis Redding - but perhaps her key influence was Bessie Smith (above), The Empress of the Blues, who died on 26 September 1937. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia, which clearly bothered Janis. In August 1970, along with Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Smith, she paid for a tombstone to be erected. Singer-songwriter Dory Previn even penned a song about it, Stone for Bessie Smith, on her 1971 album Mythical Kings and Iguanas.

 

 

 

 

A loving telegram sent by her ex-boyfriend turned up the day after she died

In February 1970, Janis went to Brazil to try and get off heroin. While there, she met a middle-class American tourist/traveller called David Niehaus. He helped Janis kick her habit and they fell in love. Back in the US, however, Janis started using again and their relationship suffered. Niehaus continued his travels, but he never fell out of love. On the morning after Joplin’s death a telegram was found at the Landmark Motor Hotel, where Janis was staying while recording a new album. It read: "Love you Mama, more than you know…" And Berg has always wondered whether things would have turned out differently if Janis had received it.

 

DISCLAIMER: the images used by Videomuzic are for the purpose of criticism and exercise of the right to report news, in low quality, in compliance with the provisions of the law on copyright, used exclusively for the information content.
DISCLAIMER: Videomuzic usa le immagini per finalità di critica ed esercizio del diritto di cronaca in modalità degradata conforme alle prescrizioni della legge sul diritto d'autore utilizzate ad esclusivo corredo dei contenuti informativi.
Copyright © 2022 Videomuzic | Rome. ITA | Pictures, videos remain the property of the copyright owner, Any copyright owner who wants removed should contact us..
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram