Joplin musical snapshot of rock icon’s life

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

Saturday’s performance of A Night with Janis Joplin captures the essence of the rock superstar: her humor, her humanity, and her passion for her music, but it’s not a carbon copy of Joplin, who died in 1970 at age 27, her younger brother, Michael, says.

Joplin said he and his sister, Laura, were looking for something that would capture a moment in time of their older sibling.

“Our intention was to do a ‘night with’; we didn’t want to do a ‘Madame Tussaud’ thing, we didn’t want to do a ‘birth to death’ thing,” Joplin said. “My sister, Laura, and I wanted to just enjoy an evening with her.”

And that’s the kind of production theatre veteran Randy Johnson has created for the Joplins and the theatre-going public.

“When it was presented to us, we went ‘oh my god, this is so in the realm of what we wanted: to spend an evening with Janis, let her talk to us, sing for us, be with us’,” he noted. “I love it to death.”

While Joplin acknowledged it’s hard to lose a sibling at a young age — or any time, for that matter — it’s somewhat different when that person is a musical icon.

“In some aspects, she hasn’t gone,” he said, noting that interest in Janis and her music is still strong nearly 50 years after her death.

Michael Joplin shared some of his early memories of his oldest sister, noting that Janis taught sister Laura to play the guitar and, because she was also an artist growing up, she taught him to draw.

“She was the older sibling, so she did that older sibling stuff,” Joplin said of Janis.

He noted though, that while Janis dressed like a Hippie and interacted with that generation in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury area after leaving her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, she identified mostly with the Beat Generation.

“She was more of a Beatnik, did more of a Kerouac thing,” he said, noting that Janis was a couple of years older than most of the Hippies.

Janis’ musical influences came mostly from the Blues and Soul genres: Bessie Smith, Odetta, Nina Simone, Etta James, and Aretha Franklin — powerful singers who had an impact on music, as well as America in general.

Michael Joplin said it still amazes him that there is so much interest in his sister even today, but said he feels it’s because of the passion she put into her music.

“Janis put it all on the table, which is still an unusual thing for any musician to do,” he added. “That’s the thing that resonates with people.

“She knew there was a potential price to pay for that, and she was willing to pay it,” Joplin said.

He also noted that, when he and Laura were asked for their opinion on the singers who portrayed Janis, they said they didn’t want a copy of Janis, but someone who was willing to sing with passion and let the music rock in their own way.

Joplin said Mary Bridget Davies, who portrays Janis in A Night with Janis Joplin, does that very well.

“Mary Bridget is a force,” he said.

Tickets are still available for A Night with Janis Joplin, which comes to the Niswonger Performing Arts Center of Northwest Ohio at 7:30 p.m. this Saturday, September 28. Tickets can be purchased by calling the NPAC box office at 419.238.6722 from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. each day, or online at www.npacvw.org.