Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin by Ellis Amburn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'Premier white blues singer of the '60s,' Rolling Stone
'One of the brightest stars rock has ever produced,' The Who's Who in Rock
'Janis Joplin expressed one side of 1968 fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe.' Time"

Ellis Amburn's Pearl. The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin (1993) has been an exasperating read for me. What begins as a captivating biography of a great artist eventually morphs into a litany of lurid, tabloid-worthy descriptions of excesses in sex and drug use. I will whine about that some more later; let's begin with the good stuff.

The author sets up Janis Joplin's story in an interesting way: it begins with the singer's "crushing disappointment" when she attends the 10th reunion of her high school class of 1960. In 1970 Janis Joplin is at the peak of world fame but the people of Port Arthur, TX, the town where she was born, still do not accept her. The Texas Bible Belt town has never forgiven Janis for her lifestyle, the author is saying. The entire biography seems to be based upon the theme of a "star in quest of the self-esteem denied her in adolescence", which eventually proves "unrecoverable." Mr. Amburn sees the clear path from the Port Arthur rejection of the star to her death in a Hollywood motel of a drug overdose just seven weeks later. The motif of the reunion provides a narrative clasp that ties the story together.

The early portion of the biography follows the singer's childhood and youth, and her increasingly rebellious behavior. She searches for her idols, the beatniks, in Venice, California, in 1961, but comes back home disappointed. She performs one song at a club in Beaumont, TX, but only manages to scare the audience with her intensity. Her first real public performance comes in 1963 in a club in San Francisco. Then she hits "a spectacular bottom":

"All she wanted to do was to wallow in dope - any kind she could get - 'smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope.'"

Again she goes back home to Texas where she spends about a year. And it is only in 1966 when she gets her big break: an audition for the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which set her on the road to stardom.

The passages about the epochal years 1966 - 1968 in San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury times of "the massive counterculture convocations" such as the Human Be-In read great. Alas, soon the gossip begins dominating the biography and the reader is treated to mentions of Janis Joplin's orgasms or Jimi Hendrix' penis size. The singer falls deeper and deeper into drugs: extremely heavy heroin and alcohol use - to the extent that she sometimes performs on complete alcoholic blackouts.

It is clear that Janis Joplin's life trajectory arced from seeking recognition to seeking instant gratification at every moment of her life when she became a world famous singer, but I dispute the author's need of repetitiously providing salacious and grim details of Joplin's drug-fueled escapades. One cannot escape the suspicion that the author's goal is to titillate the reader with the gossip-level trivia.

While explicit sex scenes and references work well in great literature, let's just mention the unforgettable The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B , peddling information about who ejaculated into whom and how many times an orgasm has been achieved does not really belong in a biography of an artist, even if it is a rock artist. Artists have a right to privacy, like all of us (maybe except politicians). Also, in my view, the connection between the artist's behavior and the greatness of her art is tenuous at best, although many people would probably disagree.

The author ends the biography with a wonderful sentence:

"That she achieved as much as she did, considering the burden of suffering she carried, makes her a shining example of the human spirit."

I agree, but the sensationalist biography in no way supports that statement and is, in a way, offensive to the great artist.

Two and a half stars.

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