WRITING PORTFOLIO
Note for teachers: All Writing Portfolio prompts have been designed to correspond with Kentucky
Department of Education Core Content for Writing Assessment.
Fund for the Arts
Members Agency
1. LITERARY WRITING
Choose a musical artist that lived in the same time period as Janis Joplin (preferably don’t use Janis herself ).
Identify an important event in their life — it can be culturally or personally significant. Then write a monologue
from the musical artist’s point of view. What do you think that person would say about that particular event? You
could use music and/or your research to give context and insight that contrasts with the personal story you imagine them saying. (See the additional reading list to find research ideas).
Study Guide
2. TRANSACTIVE WRITING
Pick an artist working today and select one of their CDs to review. Write a music review of the CD from the
point of view of a music critic. In the review, talk about to whom the artist is speaking (who is their audience)
and what the artist is saying. For example, is the artist writing about their life or their view of the world? Then
try and decipher the message you feel this artist is sending to their listeners. Make sure you present the message
clearly and are confident in what s/he is saying. Maybe when all of the reviews are written they can be compiled
into a booklet.
Getting the most out of the Study Guide for
Love, Janis
3. PERSONAL WRITING
Our Study Guides are designed with you and your classroom in mind, with instruction and
information that can be implemented in your curriculum. Feel free to copy the study guide
for other teachers and for students. Some information and activities you may wish to cover
before your workshops and the performance, some are more appropriate for discussion
afterwards. Feel free to implement any article, activity, writing portfolio exercise or postshow discussion question as you see fit.
Janis Joplin dealt with many problems in his short life. Think of a problem or obstacle you once faced and write
an essay describing how you overcame, or failed to overcome the problem and what the experience taught you.
Before the Performance:
Using the articles in the study guide, students will be more engaged in the performance.
Our study guide for Love, Janis addresses specific Core Content relating to the information below. The following information can be found in this guide:
• How the politics and culture of the 1960s affected the
music and life of Janis Joplin.
• A timeline of Janis’ life and career
• Historical information on the beat generation,
hippies and music festivals
After the Performance:
With the play as a reference point, our questions, activities, and writing portfolio exercises
can be incorporated into your classroom discussions and can enable students to develop
their higher-level thinking skills. Our study guide for Love, Janis also addresses specific
Core Content, for example (more core content found in the guide):
AH-M 1.2.32
AH-H 1.2.32
AH-M 3.1.311
AH-M 3.2.32
If you have questions or suggestions for improvements in our study guides, please contact
Danielle Minnis, Education Director, at 502-584-1265 or [email protected].
Love,
actors theatre of louisville ■ 316 West Main Street ■ Louisville, KY 40202-4218
Box office 502-584-1205 ■ Group Sales 502-585-1210 ■ Business Office 502-584-1265
ActorsTheatre.org
Janis
Study Guide compiled by Melanie Anne Henry
and Raven J. Railey unless otherwise noted.
POST-SHOW DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) Janis Joplin was a real person whose trials and tribulations
are performed on stage. What techniques does the author
use to make her life interesting? Can you think of other examples where artists have adapted someone’s life for the stage
or for film? How do they compare and contrast to Love,
Janis? What do you think about taking somebody’s life and
making a art out of it?
2) As soon as Janis Joplin’s career began, she was widely
accepted in society’s counterculture as a musical artist and as
a person. Do you think that Janis Joplin emotionally overcame the rejection she endured in her Texas hometown? If
so, what qualities and habits do you think she took from
Texas that could help her succeed in San Francisco? How do
you think she used her past life to thrive in the music world?
Play Synopsis /
Character Discussion
When Janis Joplin left Texas for San Francisco in June 1966, the 23-year-old
singer had nothing but dreams and the voice that would make her a musical legend in just a few years. She didn’t even have bus fare to get back home if her
hopes went bust.
Love, Janis starts with her arrival in the California hippie mecca. It traces her
drug- and alcohol-soaked career as a blues and rock singer until her death—the
result of a heroin overdose—in October 1970.
The story of Janis’ life during these four years is told primarily through her own
words: the letters she wrote to her conservative parents home in Port Arthur,
Texas, and the interviews she gave to countless magazines, newspapers, television
and radio stations. These conversations and letters are woven together with her
famous music, performed with a band assembled by musical director Sam
Andrew, who played guitar with the real Janis Joplin during most of her career.
The fact that the story is told in her own words sets it apart form most other
biographies. Another thing that makes it different is that Janis is played by not
one, but two different actresses at the same time. Randal Myler, who wrote and
directed the play, describes Love, Janis as a one-woman show performed by two
actresses. The “Janis” character reads the letters, while the “Janis Joplin” character sings with the band. The idea came to Myler when he was reading the letters
Janis’ sister, Laura Joplin, had saved. He realized there were two different sides
to the singer’s personality: the daring, on-stage side of her that her fans knew and
the quiet, “little-girl-lost,” off-stage side that was reserved for family and close
friends.
In the show, those two sides often come together in conversations with the
Interviewer, whom the audience never sees. There were several reasons, Myler
said, for keeping the Interviewer offstage so the audience only ever hears his voice.
First, although Joplin had brief relationships with men, she remained single
throughout her life – choosing to focus on her music and performing rather than
take a husband. “There’s no place in Janis’ life for a male on stage,” Myler said.
More importantly, the Interviewer does not represent any individual person, but
a combination of all the interviewers Joplin interacted with during her life—the
“faceless press,” says Myler. “They can be anybody. They can be press in Texas.
They can be press in New York or San Francisco. They’re not important enough
to be on stage with her.”
3) Many people have been known to use drugs and alcohol
to forget or overcome difficulties in their lives; artists also use
them to induce creativity. Why do you think Janis Joplin
turned to drinking and drugs so soon into her career? Did the
newness and mystery of drugs in the 1960s appeal more to
her, or do you think she used them to cope with fame? What
in the play or in the actor’s performance supports your point.
What other contributions do you think Janis Joplin would
have made to society had she not died so young?
4) Many think that Janis Joplin just couldn’t handle the pressures of life as a celebrity. What pressures can you find in
the play that she under? How did she try to deal with them?
What do you think she could have done differently to deal
with the expectation that comes with being a rock star? How
do you think you would deal with millions of people loving
you and your art?
5) Before Janis Joplin, “female rock stars were always meant
to be pretty, playa tambourine, wear a long skirt and stand
in back,” said Love, Janis director and writer Randal Myler.
Her refusal to follow this stereotype changed the way many
people looked at women singers and made them question
their assumptions of what is feminine. Can you think of other
female singers since her time who have challenged expectations of women’s roles in music or other areas of the arts?
Janis with Big Brother and the Holding Company
June 1966 – Janis moves to San
Francisco and begins singing with
Big Brother and the Holding
Company.
January 1970 – Kozmic Blues disbands.
October 1966 – California makes LSD
illegal.
April 1970 – Janis forms the Full-Tilt Boogie Band.
January 1967 – 20,000 attend first BeIn at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco,
where Big Brother performs with the
Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and
others. The Be-In focused on key ideas
of the 1960s counter-culture: personal
power, peaceful protest, ecological
awareness and consciousness expansion.
April 1967 – More than 400,000 march from Central Park to UN for Anti-Vietnam War protest
in New York.
June 1967 – The Monterey International Pop Festival catapults Janis into the
national spotlight.
February 1970 – Janis flies to Brazil for Carnivale, a huge festival in Rio de
Janeiro, and to “get off drugs and dry out.”
May 1970 – Four students are killed when National
Guardsmen and students clash in Anti-Vietnam
protests at Kent State University in Ohio.
August 1970 – Janis attends her high school
reunion in Port Arthur.
September 1970 – Janis and Full-Tilt Boogie
begin recording tracks for Pearl. Jimi Hendrix
dies from an overdose of sleeping pills.
October 4, 1970 – Janis dies from a heroin
overdose in her room at the Landmark
Motor Hotel in West Hollywood.
1971 – Janis’ last album, Pearl, is released.
Summer 1967 – Summer of Love in San Francisco: the hippie movement is at its height. Race
riots break out in Chicago, Brooklyn, Newark,
Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit.
October 1967 – 35,000 march on the Pentagon in
Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War.
April 1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in
Memphis. The musical Hair brings the hippie movement to the stage when it opens on Broadway.
June 1971 – The New York Times and the Washington Post publish the Pentagon Papers, the
Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War.
July 1971 – Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, dies in Paris.
January 1973 – The Paris Peace Accords are signed, officially ending U.S. involvement in the
Vietnam War.
Protesting the
Vietnam Conflict
August 1974 – The Watergate scandel shows the White House was involved in a number of
crimes and illegal cover-ups and Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to resign.
June 1968 – Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated.
— Raven J. Railey with Julie Felise Dubiner
August1968 – Big Brother and the Holding Company releases its first album,
Cheap Thrills.
November 1968 – Richard Nixon is elected president. Under his leadership, the U.S. will slowly
begin to withdraw troops from Vietnam.
December 1968 – Janis plays her last gig with Big Brother at the Family Dog
Benefit in San Francisco. Later that month, she appears with her new band, to be
named the Kozmic Blues Band, in Memphis.
July 1969 – Humans first walk on the Moon.
August 1969 – 500,000 attend Woodstock
Music and Art Fair in Bethel, N.Y. Sam Andrew
gives last performance with Kozmic Blues.
October 1969 – Beat writer Jack Kerouac dies. Supreme
Court orders desegregation nationwide. Millions take
part in the March on Washington, the largest antiwar
rally in U.S. history.
1970 – The Beatles break up.
Woodstock
Timeline
Janis Joplin lived in an exciting and turbulent time marked by
both idealism and disillusionment in politics and society. It was
a time of rapid change and innovation scientifically, culturally
and musically. Here are a some key moments:
1877 – Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, the first device for recording and replaying
sound.
1895 – “Laughing Song” is the first recorded blues song, by industry pioneer and former
Virginia plantation slave George W. Johnson.
1937 – Bessie Smith dies. Called the “Empress of the Blues,” her music would influence Janis
Joplin.
December 1941 – The United States enter World War II after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.
January 19, 1943 – Janis Lyn Joplin is born to Seth and Dorothy Joplin in the oil
refinery seaport of Port Arthur, Texas.
1945 – World War II ends: The Soviets invade Berlin; Adolf Hitler commits suicide. Japan surrenders after the United States drops the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
Allies divide Germany and Berlin. The United Nations is officially formed.
Summer 1950 – North Korean troops invade South Korea. U.S. troops defend South Korea
alongside forces from other United Nations countries.
1952 –Bandstand, later called American Bandstand, premieres. The TV show has teens dancing
to rock-and-roll music. It will be cancelled in 1987, in part due to the rise of music video channels.
July 1953 – The Korean War ends when a cease-fire is declared.
1955 – “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets becomes the
first rock-and-roll song to hit #1. Poet Allen Ginsburg reads “Howl” at the Six Gallery, bringing
the Beats to San Francisco.
1956 – “Heartbreak Hotel” becomes Elvis Presley’s first #1 hit. He will become one of the
most popular American singers ever, selling over one billion recordings worldwide — more
than anyone else in history.
1957 – Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac publishes his novel, On the Road.
1958 – At age 15, Janis reads about Kerouac and the Beats in Time magazine
and decides to become a beatnik.
May 1960 – In response to bombings against churches and schools in the South, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the 1960 Civil Rights Act, creating a Civil Rights Commission and
introducing penalties for obstructing a person’s attempt to vote.
November 1960 – John F. Kennedy elected president. His Inaugural Address challenges
Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” His administration focused on expanding civil rights and bringing aid to poorer nations
through the formation of the Peace Corps.
New Year’s Eve 1961 – Janis has her first public singing engagement at the
Halfway House in Beaumont, Texas.
Singing
“The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities,
who came to the conclusion that society sucked.”
— Amiri Baraka, writer/poet
While Janis Joplin was a skilled and powerful
singer, her signature sound put a lot of strain on
her voice. During her life, other singers warned
her that unless she learned to protect her vocal
chords, she could seriously damage them over
the years. Joplin often said she didn’t care—
she’d rather enjoying singing in the moment
than worry about the future. But before she
died, she began to show an interest in improving her technique.
As a teenager in a small Texas town during the 1950s, Janis Joplin got plenty of messages—from her family, her schoolmates, magazines and television—that she was supposed to conform to the ideals of mainstream American culture. But she didn’t.
1961 – East Germany begins construction on the Berlin
Wall, which separates communist-controlled East Berlin
from capitalist West Berlin.
Summer 1962 – Janis moves to folk/beat
apartment house in Austin while attending the
University of Texas there. She sings and plays
autoharp as part of bluegrass band, the Waller
Creek Boys.
BEATS AND HIPPIES
She didn’t fit the model of feminine beauty or proper behavior for a middle-class girl. She disagreed with
the owner of the toy shop where she worked who made her mark the prices up one day just to mark them
back to the original price the next day and call it a “sale.” Instead of bobby sox and loafers, she sported
black or purple leotards and flaunted her skirts hemmed above the knee when fashion called for them to
fall just below.
One of Janis’ early folk bands
September 1962 – Timothy Leary founds International Foundation for Internal Freedom to
promote LSD research.
Fall 1962 – Fraternity boys at University of Texas start a campaign to have
Janis voted “Ugliest Man on Campus.”
October 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Union brings the world to the brink of nuclear
war by building missile bases in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. After tense negotiations
between President Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader agrees to
remove the missiles.
1963 – Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, is published. It discusses
the worthlessness women feel in roles that require them to be financially, intellectually and
emotionally dependent upon their husbands.
January 1963 – Janis hitches to San Francisco with friend Chet Helms, begins
singing and passing the hat in coffeehouses.
August 1963 – 200,000 people attend Washington, D.C., Civil Rights March, where civil right
leader Martin Luther King, Jr. makes his “I Have a Dream” speech.
So it only made sense that this young nonconformist would identify with Beat Generation writers like Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. Centered in
artist colonies in New York, San Francisco and Venice, California from the late 1940s through the early
’60s, the beats made challenging society’s rules a way of life and a form of high art.
They gave rise to a counter-culture that rejected the middle-class American values they’d grown up with,
including racial segregation, capitalist enterprise and military authority. They experimented with sex and
drugs. They embraced eastern religions such as Zen Buddhism and promoted ecological consciousness.
They glorified personal freedom, poverty and criminal behavior. There was no purpose to modern society, they believed, so they dropped out of it. They didn’t try to change mainstream culture, but withdrew
from it to travel the country and live with others who shared their disdain for convention—those who were
“hip.”
Artistically, the beats prized the free-flowing creativity associated with improvisational jazz. When writing
his now classic novel, On the Road, it’s said Kerouac was high on speed and typing on a continuous scroll
of telegraph paper to avoid breaking the chain of thought at the end of the sheet. He believed “the first
thought is best thought.”
To these writers, the term “beat” originally meant being “tired” or “beaten down.” Later, Kerouac added
“upbeat” and “beatific” (joyful or blessed) to the meaning. The word also emphasized the importance they
placed on rhythm and jazz. Intended as a insult, a San Francisco columnist first expanded the term to
“beatnik”—a reference to the Russian satellite Sputnik—suggesting the beats were both “way out there”
and pro-Communist. They took the slur and wore it proudly. Soon, “beatnik” conjured images of blackclad men with goatees wearing sunglasses and berets playing bongos and reading poetry in coffeehouses.
To followers, it was all about being hip and “playing it cool.”
November 1963 – President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon B. Johnson becomes
president.
To the un-hip “squares” of mainstream culture, beatniks were just ignorant criminals, lazy delinquents,
alcoholics and drug addicts who contributed nothing of value to society. The same would be said about
hippies as beat culture gave way to the hippie movement in the late 1960s.
February 1964 – British rock band The Beatles appears on American TV variety program, The
Ed Sullivan Show, beginning the British invasion in pop music.
Somber colors and dark shades were replaced with colorful “psychedelic” clothing and long hair. “Playing
it cool,” or keeping a low profile, took a back seat to “being cool,” or displaying one’s individuality. Rock
and roll music and folk songs became more popular than jazz and bebop. And while the beats tended to
shun politics, the hippies actively took part in the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam
War. Most important for women, birth control pills became available in the early ’60s, leading to an explosion in sexual exploration and giving females greater control over their reproductive lives.
July 1964 – President Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits segregation in
any public place and creates the Equal Employment Commission.
June 1964 – Janis returns to Port Arthur and gives college another go at Lamar
Tech.
March 1965 – The U.S. steps up its support of South Vietnam in its war against communistbacked North Vietnam by sending the American combat troops.
Summer 1960 – Janis graduates Thomas Jefferson High School and enrolls at
Lamar Tech College.
August 1965 – A six-day race riot in Watts section of Los Angeles leaves 35 dead.
Fall 1960 – Janis moves to Los Angeles to live with her mother’s sisters and
falls in with the beatnik scene in Venice, California.
September 1965 – San Francisco writer Michael Fallon applies the term “hippie” to the San
Francisco counterculture in an article about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse.
Despite these differences, the foundations of the hippie movement of the ’60s and ’70s were laid much
earlier by the beats, who—for the first time—made not conforming with popular culture cooler than fitting in. Their ideas about art and society greatly influenced the “free love,” anti-war values of the hippies.
Many have also recognized the impact the beat movement had on later counter-culture trends like the
punks, slackers and goths.
And as for Janis: She once said, “All I ever wanted to be was a beatnik.” Well, she became a psychedelic
star of the hippie’s Summer of Love instead.
In staging Love, Janis around the country over
the past several years, one of the greatest challenges has been finding singers who could capture the power and energy of Joplin’s sound—
without damaging their own voices. And since
Joplin never performed more than three or four
shows a week, the actresses portraying her
were singing more than she did.
“Some of the biggest Broadway stars tried to
do the show and they’re the ones who lasted
the shortest length of time,” said writer and
director Randal Myler. “Janis was a freak of
nature in her singing style. It can strip your
voice if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Actors Theatre of Louisville has dealt this problem by hiring two different actresses to play the
singing Janis Joplin character. Katrina Chester
and Lauren Dragon will alternate in the role to
protect their voices.
Chester also performed the role in 2002-2003
in New York. Like Joplin, Chester is a “street
singer,” who hasn’t had much training. She’s
toured and recorded albums with blues and
rock bands since she was a teen.
“Singing this music is very different,” she said.
“You’re really shocking your vocal chords. If
you can get past the first month, you’re OK.”
And alternating between singing and talking—
as she must do on stage—places an extra strain
on the voice. To protect her vocal chords when
she’s offstage, Chester avoids smoking, caffeine (even ice tea) and alcohol because they
all hurt the vocal muscles. She doesn’t speak for
the first three hours every day when she’s performing and avoids yelling—except on stage.
Finally, she gets nine to 13 hours of sleep each
night. “The one thing that will help your vocal
chords more than anything else is sleep,” she
said. “Eight hours is really not that great.”
CAREERS IN THEATRE
An interview with Randal Myler, Love, Janis playwright
After chasing down writer/director of Love, Janis Randal
Myler, I enjoyed a fabulous interview with him mainly
focused on his direction of the musical. Myler studied at
the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in
California and then went on the University of Alberta in
Canada. He has written other biographical pieces on
artists such as Hank Williams, Nat King Cole, and The
Mamas and The Papas. Having directed hundreds of
plays, Myler has a distinct directing style and some good
advice to young theatre artists.
were two definite sides to her persona. Was she the biker
chick up there singing or was she the little girl in her mother’s dress up clothes? There are two very strong personas
with Janis - there’s an off-stage and an on-stage persona.
In a play you can do anything. And to be honest, realistically, you couldn’t sing those songs and then do those letters. You couldn’t do those letters and then sing those
songs. You’d have to lie down. I always saw it as a onewoman show done by two performers.
Why isn’t the interviewer seen?
How did you start out in the theatre world?
I’ve just been doing theatre since high school. I haven’t
done anything else. I trained as an actor and somewhere
in college switched over to writing and directing and
never looked back. I’m glad I trained as an actor though,
because you learn a lot. It teaches you how to treat people in a certain way.
What is your favorite play that you’ve
directed?
It’s corny to say but they’re always my favorite when I’m
working on them. I’ve been away from this show for a
couple of years and working on other pieces. But it’s great
to come back to it because it’s like you’re coming back to
old friends. To come back to Janis Joplin and relive that
world is to relive a part of my teenage years - growing up
in the Bay area during the Summer of Love. So right now,
this is my favorite and when I’m opening this play and
move on, the next one will be my favorite. They are all my
children and you shouldn’t have a favorite child.
How do you see your directing in comparison to other directing styles or habits?
I think each director evolves their own style and there’s no
right or wrong in that style. There are directors that I
admire that are very stylized in their direction. I don’t like
to see my direction on stage, yet there are a lot of directors who love to see their direction on stage. I feel best
when I don’t see my direction at all so long as the acting
is real. I like to hide as a director. I think that’s just my style;
I prefer not to see it. Actually I prefer not to see a director’s work in other shows, it’s just not my taste. I don’t want
to see their ideas in clocking or notice their ideas in acting. It’s a matter of personal taste.
Why did you decide to have the role of Janis
played by two different actors?
I didn’t set out to do that in any theatrical way. I realized
the more I listened to the music and read the letters, there
There’s no place in Janis’ life for a male on stage. I don’t
think one was around long enough. I think she was in the
midst of a male-dominated rock scene. And I think the
interviewers, they’re faceless press that built her up and
knocked her down. That’s what press does. And I think
that that’s just a choice I made. I didn’t want to see that
person. They’re not important enough to be on stage with
her. Plus, you know, once they’re not there, they can be
anybody. They can be press in Texas; they can be press
in New York; they can be press in San Francisco. They’re
just the unseen press. You don’t see them when you read
the reviews in the papers.
What has been the biggest challenge in
doing this show?
I think the biggest challenge is probably finding the
singers to do the show. Because everything about Janis’
style of music is incorrect - in terms of singing it. Some of
the biggest Broadway stars tried to do the show and
they’re the ones who lasted the shortest length of time.
Janis was a freak of nature in her singing style and she
didn’t have to sing eight shows a week. Even at her
height, she sang a show or two and was wasted. The
style of singing is adverse to what you learn from your
singing coaches. It can strip your voice if you don’t know
what you’re doing. The most success we’ve had are the
singers that work for a living as singers and are used to
starting their performance at 10 at night.
What advice do you have for younger
people wanting to work in the theatre?
If you want to be an actor in the theatre, start in high
school taking lots of different things: chorus, singing,
dance, movement. You know all those different things can
help you as an actor. Just do as much of it as you can. We
all started in small high schools somewhere. All the big
stars in New York started in small towns and small high
schools. We tend to forget that we all come from somewhere like that. It’s hard to imagine that as a kid in high
school, but it’s true. Everybody came to New York from
somewhere.
Festival Review: Now & Then
Max Yasgur — the man who lent his land to 450,000 hippies for a weekend in
August 1969 — referred to Woodstock as “the largest group of people ever assembled in one place.” He also said to the crowd on the first day of Woodstock “I
think you people have proven something to the world: that a half a million kids
can get together and have three days of fun and music.” The International Movie
Database referred to the 1967 festival Monterey Pop as “the last pure gasp of sixties love and harmony, coming as it did before things went haywire in 1968 &
1969. While Woodstock was more of a rampage of frustration, Monterey is more
representative of how those who were there want the sixties remembered.” Quotes
from today’s music festivals include Bonnaroo being named “the rock festival to
end all festivals” while the official Wakarusa website suggests their festival to be “a
perfect world”. How have festivals changed since then and now, and is that change
for the better?
With the growing popularity of modern festivals such as Bonaroo and Wakarusa,
it becomes necessary to ask of the difference between current festivals and festivals
of the 1960s counter-culture. What are the similarities between the way our society was observed in the 1960s and the way we view it today? Who are the observers
that we rely on to tell us about our culture? Are the founders of Bonnaroo and
Wakarusa and Lollapalooza trying to promote the long lost ideas of peace, love and
harmony — or are they just trying to make money? How are these festivals the
same? And furthermore, how are they different? It is possible to revive the ideals
of 1960s counter-culture such as freedom of expression, free love, and world peace
(or what critics call naivete)? These questions are what bring about a slew of controversy surrounding modern and classic music festivals.
A growing culture of social insubordination to the government was prominent in
the 1960s. Whether it was Bob Dylan singing about the assassination of early
1960s Civil Rights leader Medger Evers, the widespread rejection of 1950s culture
among young adults, or the Grateful Dead promoting the use of hallucinogens —
musicians openly criticized the mainstream culture and opinions of 1960s
American society. The same has become true in today’s society. Though the politics of our government lean on the conservative side of issues, more and more
United States citizens rejecting the norm and designing their own beliefs and
morals. Progressive artists such as Janis Joplin, Melanie Safka, and Jimi Hendrix
appeared at festivals in the 1960s and the same is true for festivals today: musical
artists Ben Harper, Ani DiFranco, and the Yonder Mountain String Band — all of
whom are fairly left — play at today’s festivals. However, the overall feeling of festivals today seems different.
While researching for this article, I noticed a major difference between the classic
and contemporary festivals in the visual aspects of the websites I researched. The
websites for Woodstock and Monterey Pop are full of flowers, and peace signs. The
slogan used for the Woodstock poster is “Three Days of Peace and Music,” and
Monterey Pop is credited with jumpstarting the “Summer of Love.” The websites
for Bonnaroo and Wakarusa, however, focus more on what accolades each festival
has received from the media including Rolling Stone and Spin magazine.
I attended Bonaroo in the summer of 2004. I didn’t get the vibe of “free love” or
the sense of community between the other attendees and myself. What I saw was
a microcosm of capitalism and money that was eaten up by people who claim to
reject the materialistic and consumer driven image of today’s world. The difference
was made clear to me when I watched the Woodstock anniversary video. The
amount of concession — t-shirts, necklaces, drinks, and food — is much more
available at these contemporary festivals than they were at festivals in the 1960s. It
seems that, though encouraged hedonism and excess, Woodstock and Monterey
Pop truly focused on community and togetherness while Bonnaroo and Wakarusa
are much more individualistic.
Further Reading
Janis Joplin
Love, Janis by Laura Joplin
Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin by Myra Friedman
Piece of My Heart: A Portrait of Janis Joplin by David Dalton
Janis by David Dalton
Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols
Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin by Ellis Amburn
A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them by Buzzy
Jackson
The Sixties
The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s by David Farber and Beth Bailey
The Haight-Ashbury: A History by Charles Perry
Beneath the Diamond Sky: Haight Ashbury 1965-1970 by Barney Hoskyns
Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair by James E. Perone
Woodstock: The Oral History by Joel Makower
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right: Bob Dylan, the Early Years by Andy Gill
Dylan: A Man Called Alias by Richard Williams
Jimi Hendrix: The Man, the Magic, the Truth by Sharon Lawrence
Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison by James Riordan and
Jerry Prochinichy
The Beatles Anthology by Beatles
Ticket to Ride by Larry Kane
Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin,
Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead by Bob Weir
Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Martin Luther King Jr. and
Clayborne Carson
John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O’Brien
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
The Beat Generation
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters
Happy Birthday of Death by Gregory Corso
Long Live Man by Gregory Corso
The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the American
Culture by Holly George-Warren
Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems by Michael McClure
On the Web
www.actorstheatre.org – Interactive timeline of Janis Joplin’s life and historical
events
www.janisjoplin.net and www.janisjoplinforever.com – Information about the
singer
www.rollingstone.com – Biographies and information about rock musicians
www.woodstock69.com – Information about the original Woodstock festival
www.bonnaroo.com – Details on Bannaroo Art and Music festival