DB's Song of the Day (day 277): "GET IT WHILE YOU CAN" (1971) Janis Joplin

Today is the deathday of Janis Joplin, and tomorrow is the birthday of my wife, Mary, who early on was a fan of Janis. So, today’s song forms a tribute to both. It’s the final track on Joplin’s final (and best) album Pearl. The link here is to Janis and her Full Tilt Boogie Band playing the song live on the Dick Cavett Show in 1970. Seeing Janis perform is something in itself. And she’s in really good form on those Cavett appearances, showing how well she worked with her new band. It’s a shame she only got to make one album with them and that even on that album there’s one track, “Buried Alive in the Blues,” that never received its vocal track.

So, “things left thus undone behind me,” to borrow a sentiment—if not the exact words—from Hamlet’s death-speech is something that haunts whenever we talk about those taken prematurely. Though with Janis I won’t say “prematurely.” Pearl shows her fully mature. It’s the album she was always capable of and it’s a great thing—given how little time she had left—that it was made at all. Seeing Janis so gracious and fun on Cavett helps too to make the case that she’s come into her own. I often have the image of her as more shambolic and strung-out than she really was. Let’s not forget she was a professional, the kind of person who can put even someone as uptight as Cavett at ease. There’s a great moment where he’s asking her about a tattoo on her wrist and then touches it. And she sort of lights up as though “Dick’s making his move!” and you can see how encouraging she would be if he wanted to crack that shell and get down with her. But, nope, the moment passes.

Janis was someone who got past a lot of what they used to call “hang ups.” And when she sang she exorcised plenty of demons. What I like about her performance of today’s song is how much she lays it all on the line. While she’s singing, she’s preaching. She means every word: “Don’t you know when you’re loving anybody, babe / You’re taking a gamble on a little sorrow / But then who cares, baby? ’Cause we might not be here tomorrow.”  That’s the take away not just on the “use it or lose it” philosophy, but also underscores how ephemeral it all is. Love, don’t love. It ain’t gonna last—not even if it lasts a lifetime. “Who cares, baby?”

It’s also good hearing that coming from Janis, since she’s sort of the patron saint of every woman in an abusive relationship—by which, she would mean, any in which the woman gets beat-up emotionally by her man. She’s usually emphasizing that “sorrow” part of the equation more than the “who cares” part. There’s a fun moment when she surprises Cavett with a very quick and trenchant interpretation of her symbol for most relationships, which she characterizes as the mule with the carrot and the cart. Cavett wryly asks what equates with what—male and female—in that figure and she replies that the man is holding the carrot to make the mule (the woman) run, “promising something more than he’s ever willing to give.” Cavett seems struck by the aptness of the figure, then quips something about suddenly having to defend his entire sex. “Go ahead,” Janis quips right back.

About the song—it was written by Jerry Ragovy and Mort Shuman (the guy who, among many songs written, worked on those Jacques Brel translations I’ve mentioned before) and was a 1966 radio song. Janis takes it away for her own, and watching her “recover herself” at the song's end, after putting it out there—on talk television, no less!—is affecting. I’m pretty sure I caught at least one of these Cavett appearances when it occurred because I know I saw her on TV and if wasn’t then, it must’ve been on Tom Jones. Anyway, it’s still something to see.

Of course, today’s song is all about holding onto the love of a man, which is conceived of as fairly slippery. And listen to how she sweetens the “if anybody should come along / He gonna give you  love and affection” and gets so strident and insistent with “I’d say ‘get it while you can’”—and then that string of “get it, want it, need it, hold it” that becomes a rather succinct game plan for how to hold onto love, which is what the song is all about, while always acknowledging that “while you can” implies that you might not “get it” whenever you want nor for as long as you’d like, while “want it” and “need it” might also not be permanent states.

Which is all a way of underscoring that it’s truly a miraculous thing—in its way—if you get it when you want it and can hold it while you need it. The blues that Janis sings comes from the fact that that so rarely occurs and then the sorrow seems all there is. But her singing on this song is as a kind of emotional survival tactic—to not let the losses outweigh the gains.

Don’t you turn your back on love

DB's Song of the Day (day 19):"ME AND BOBBY MCGEE" (1971) Janis Joplin

Today is the birthday of one of the great rock blues divas of all time: Janis Joplin, and my song for the day features one of my favorite recorded vocals, ever.  It’s Janis’s only #1 song, released in spring of 1971 after her untimely demise (she was finally recording with her own band) on October 4, 1970.  In other words, this song was my introduction to Janis Joplin and she was already dead. In any case, I bought the 45.

Later, through my first girlfriend who was a bit of a Janis devotee, I discovered Cheap Thrills, ten years after it came out, which includes incredible songs like “Piece of My Heart” and “Summertime” and “Ball and Chain” amidst the so-so acid-rock guitar of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Pearl, the album recorded with the Full-Tilt Boogie Band by Paul Rothschild that contains “Me and Bobbie McGee,” is the only LP of hers I own, besides a Greatest Hits.  I tend to stick to her studio recordings because, for all that Janis is best known as an electrifying performer (her performance at Monterey in 1967 is rightly legendary), I dislike her tendency to ramble at the mike. Joplin struggled with heroin use througout her career and drank when she was and wasn’t “straight,” so her live recordings can be rather varied in quality.  For some artists, you just had to be there.  I’d already missed that boat.

This song though is, to me, one of those “all she wrote” kind of things. “If she did nothing else and only did this song . . .” I’d still remember her and still speak highly of her way with a song. The song was written by Kris Kristofferson and has been covered by just about anyone who was around back then, but this is the performance that owns the song.  I won’t say “it’s the singer not the song,” though, because it is the perfect vehicle for Joplin, so, all due credit to Kristofferson for his song which, in her hands, becomes a major statement of “the life”: “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” That captures the blues ethos pretty well—free, but without many options.  But then “nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, honey, if it ain’t free.”  Freely given, in other words—like love, respect, joy, and all the other “nothin’s” that matter.

The song tells the tale of two hitchers—the singer and “Bobby” (male in Janis’ version, though female in Kris’s)—who hang together as long as it suits “him” apparently. “Feelin’ good was easy when Bobby sang the blues”—the interesting thing there is that, in Kristofferson’s version, sung by a male, Bobbie is a great female blues singer, and in Joplin’s version, a great female blues singer is recalling a great male blues singer.  It’s not out of place to regard this song as a eulogy for Janis herself, sung by her in honor of herself—fictionalized as Bobbie McGee.  That’s not possible, in reality, but it’s possible to feel it that way.

Bobby gets away from the singer.  “He’s lookin’ for that home and I hope he finds it.”  A way of saying that he’s looking for a stable life, stable wife, and all that dream.  Janis/Kris, the singer, is out there on the road, just looking to feel good when and if he/she can. And that means feelin’ the blues.

What really makes Joplin’s version is everything that happens after the lyrics end.  Joplin jams and riffs and just lets it go.  Listen to how she descends the scale on “lordy lordy lordy lordy lordy lordy lordy lord.”  I wait for it every time.  And every bit of that final jam—including the boogie of the Full Tilt Boogie Band—takes this song into the superlative. Given how often one heard, by 1970, of Joplin’s shambolic lifestyle, it’s a revelation how great she can be when she’s really on. In this song she completely lives up to the rep she continues to enjoy as one of the greats. In time, Joplin became synonymous with “the blues” of being a woman in a man’s world, particularly a woman who wasn’t “attractive enough” to be popular with men.  That’s part of her persona, certainly; something like the suffering heart of womanhood bluesing over the hard-hearted shittiness of manliness. She’s a plain woman with a great talent. Would such a one rise to fame in any era after the Sixties/Seventies?  Not likely. Here’s to Janis, “get it while you can.”