Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999. xxii + 408 pp. $26.00 (hardback).

It comes as news to no one that Janis Joplin is singing in the heavenly choir these days, having overdosed on heroin on October 3, 1970. The exact circumstances surrounding that death--that Joplin had only started using again just before her death having managed to kick the habit for a (short) while, that a contributing factor was the unusual purity of the drug which would subsequently be hyped as "so strong it OD'd Janis," that the reason Joplin was alone that Saturday night was that her two dates for the evening had begged off (she was looking forward to a three-way with longtime sex and drugs partner Peggy Caserta and Seth Morgan, the latest in a series of ill-chosen boyfriends and at the time Joplin's fiancé)--all of this detail may come as news to some who have not previously delved much into the life of one of rock's most renowned female figures, but such detail is not necessarily the main strength of this new biography of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols.

Nor is it really news that Joplin was "singing with the choir" in another sense, that it that she had several lesbian relationships (with Peggy Caserta, as mentioned above, but also with Jae Whitaker). Echols's book is extremely well documented, however, and any doubt about this aspect of Joplin's sexuality are put to rest once and for all by the thorough and extensive research that went into the book, including numerous interviews with those who knew Joplin (listed at the beginning of the Notes). It would be hard to reclaim Joplin as a gay icon or lesbian role model, however, since as Echols points out Joplin opposed any kind of pigeonholing and categorization and would have resisted any attempt to turn her into a spokesperson for gay liberation. Joplin's reaction to early radical feminists was that it didn't seem like they were having much fun, both an irritatingly superficial dismissal and a profound and prescient analysis of feminist malaise.

But one of the most interesting aspects of this biography is the third sense in which Joplin was singing with the choir, the literal and entirely nonfigurative sense. Little Janis Joplin was a good girl who sang in the church choir in her home town of Port Arthur, Texas, and was the apple of her parents' eye. In other words, Janis Joplin was not always a rebel and an outcast; she had once fit in very nicely. Echols can no more explain "what went wrong" than anyone else, though it is clearly related to adolescence and the rejection Joplin felt as a young girl who was perceived as fat and ugly with bad skin (her attempt to get back at her schoolmates by attending her high school reunion was a miserable failure that preceded her death by mere months). Joplin's own identification of the turning point (when she turned fourteen) is also suggestive in the light of recent work by Harvard's Carole Gilligan and other feminist psychologists who have identified the pattern of loss of confidence in the early teenage years that turns bright and confident girls into withdrawn and depressed teenagers, a pattern Joplin exemplifies. For those who want a simplified, "reader's digest" version, Joplin's life was an endless search for unconditional love and acceptance, a quest to fill an inner emptiness, and her abrasive personality was merely a cover for her vulnerability and a defense mechanism: reject before you are rejected.

All this and more can be learned from Echols's biography, but though there is plenty of gossip, sensation, and speculation there is also a higher purpose in probing into the recesses of such a life. Echols is first and foremost a historian of the 1960s (appreciated for her previous book, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 [Minnesota, 1989]), and her purpose in writing this biography, as she frequently reminds her reader, is not just to rehash the celebrity life, but to reevaluate the decade. Thus, the significant events in Joplin's life (her moves to Austin and on to San Francisco, her music career, her participation in events such as Woodstock) are all set against a discussion of a broader context: what was going on in the Haight Ashbury when Joplin got there? What was the rock and roll business like in the early years before it was commodified by big companies and before it was professionalized? Why did Woodstock come to represent such an important cultural myth? Those who just want the facts may resent these apparent "digressions" (as did the reviewer in the New York Times Book Review, Kim France [May 2, 1999]), but this is to forget that this book is meant to be about not only the life of Janis Joplin, but her times as well (as the subtitle reminds us). Echols brings the biography back into panoramic mode in her epilogue, where she situates Joplin's life as one of the emblems of the '60s: "America was transformed in the 1960s, but the exhilaration of changing the culture--breaking on through, as Jim Morrison put it--was matched by shattering personal defeat. This is the hidden history of the decade, the underside of the counterculture" (305). Joplin is not an isolated case, not even one of a handful of stars who went out blazing (Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and so on), but in some ways a typical story, a biography of one woman who tried to change American culture in the 60s and paid the price. In this sense, Echols's project is part of a larger revision of 60s history, a project that not only celebrates the revolutionary spirit of social change, the animating fire of idealism, and, what the heck, damned fine music, but that also seeks to evaluate the downside of the upheavals that resulted. But Echols is not saying that the "sixties" weren't worth it. "Acknowledging the casualties, the price of all that high-risk experimenting, isn't to say that the sixties were a mistake" she reminds us (305), concluding rather that the mistake was to underestimate the difficulty of breaking with convention, a message that has not lost its relevance today.

There are at least two distinct and rival projects to bring the life of Janis Joplin to the big screen currently in development in Hollywood, one unauthorized and entitled "Piece of My Heart," the other authorized by the Joplin estate and rumored to be more "sugar-coated" (Pat H. Broeske, "Piece of Her Heart," The Hollywood Reporter, December 22-28, 1998). The authorized project, led by executive producer Jonathan Demme, boasts the rights to Joplin's music and Lili Taylor as Joplin. The competing project has been scripted by Julie Cypher and was originally to star Melissa Etheridge, though this now seems doubtful. For those who want the quick and entertaining version of Joplin's life, "coming soon to a cinema near you" is all you need to know. But if you want to know about "the times" as well as "the life," and if you want a deeper analysis of how difficult it can be to challenge convention, read Scars of Sweet Paradise.