A Groupie Remembers Coming of Age with Janis

I was 16 in February 1968 when I heard over the car radio that there would be a free rock concert in a park not far from where we lived in South Pasadena.

The bands were Blue Cheer (after the laundry detergent?) and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

It sounded like fun, so my brother Walter and I headed for the park early to get a good spot to take it all in. We got spots on the edge of the stage just a few feet away from the bands.

Blue Cheer offered an indeciferable “wall of sound.” Grinding guitars and feedback made for an unpleasant experience even for teenage ears. We almost left.

But then came Janis Joplin. Sitting 30 feet away from her on an outdoor amphitheater stage, this 16-year-old instantly fell in love.

Janis’s presence and voice were like nothing I’d ever heard, although seasoned listeners would have heard the sound of her musical predecessors Sister Rosetta Tharp and Big Mama Thornton. To my ears, Janis was a voice that was vulnerable and needy and at the same time bold, rebellious and defiant. It was a voice that spoke to my own feelings as a young person growing up in the ’60s and to a generation in open rebellion against conformity, hypocrisy and especially the Vietnam war.

She was no beauty by conventional standards, and her voice would not have fit in a choir or close-harmony groups of the time — the Mamas and the Papas or Crosby, Stills and Nash.

But one of the joys of that brief Haight Ashbury/Woodstock era was that “beauty” was being your authentic self.

Janis embodied that one-of-a-kind, bold individuality. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen or heard.

So I became a Janis groupie, following her around the country the way Dead Heads followed their heroes, hitchhiking from coast to coast. After that first Janis moment in the park, the peak came that summer at the Eagles Auditorium in Seattle, where she shared a billing with Jimi Hendrix.

I even got to talk with her twice, once on her birthday at a little club in Huntington Beach called the Golden Bear, and another time at a music festival at the Rose Bowl.

Who knows what she thought about this teenage groupie following her around?

By the time she died in 1970 at 27, I had settled down a bit and become a student at Humboldt State College. I mourned her loss and still wonder how she would have evolved as an artist had she lived. By then my musical tastes had broadened and moved on to jazz, bluegrass and international music.

Janis had a singular impact on my growing up and who I became in my taste in music, but also on who I became as a person.

Wesley Chesbro, a member of the Senior News Community Advisory Council, rocks to the oldies in McKinleyville.