The vision of the American flag in miniature, but unrestrained vitality, larger than life, unfurled, wavering as if in the wind to a pulse that pumped blood through th earm of the ghost white, pudgy girl with her stash and hype kit who sang the blues of her veins until she burned with the brightness of fifty stars. In the sixties, the two most distinct sounds were Jimi Hendrix guitar and Janis Joplin’s voice.

Eight miles high her pearl face was the moon reflected in the dressing room mirror of the spoon, the size of a satellite dish at NASA, in the dead of night. The lady didn’t sing the blues. The lady was the blues. Janis, the goddess of entrances and departures.

Janis Joplin.
This is how she came on when she gave the
nod to nada.

Before she overdosed, she had recorded a tape "for John Lennon and at the end of the cassette, Janis had sung ‘Happy Trails to You,’ signing off with the touching wish that everyone.
Says Carl Gottlieb, ‘We were listening to it and she had not been dead twenty four hours.’ If the tape had ever reached Lennon, it would probably have appalled him. A heroin addict himself, Lennon was spooked when he heard of Janis’s death, seeing it as a sign that he, too, was doomed to an early grave" ( Amburn).

Behind the wildly colorful, manic spirit of psychedelia’s free love communal quilt, there was the needle hard at work, sewing together a sub-text as black as tar and a closer companion to the heart of darkness beating in Vietnam. The queen of the flower girls, Janis, had hybrid wildflower/rose petals of hair that blossomed from a stem that was the steel needle of a syringe.
In the sixties, in many instances, the outsider took center stage. Janis Joplin, who had wanted to be a present day Marlene Dietrich, but lacked the looks of a Heartland beauty queen while growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, turned to outrageous behavior as an alternative, which persisted until her death.