The Big Lookback: Janis Joplin

An excerpt from Carola Dibbell's memoir "Young Me: Travels With an Old Self 1967-1970"

This month’s Big Lookback goes all the way back to Christmas 1968 and all the way over to London, where my lifetime advisor Carola Dibbell elected to forego her budget version of the Ivy League grad’s traditional European tour to settle down in London, where she’d met her first husband, a Pakistani film student here dubbed Amir. It’s an excerpt from her almost-completed memoir Young Me: Travels With an Old Self 1967-1970, which for the most part is about being poor. As a so-called “Paki,” Amir was well-educated but had trouble finding good jobs or showing up at bad ones. So Carola trained as a kindergarten teacher, did most of the housekeeping, and went to the movies with her husband all the time. They owned a suitcase stereo but very few records. As this passage recounts, however, they had their share of well-off friends and relatives, who provided the music she writes about here.

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Amir’s brothers came to London for Christmas. One had just visited the family in Lahore and brought us Indian candy, which I thought was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten in my life. That local teacher friend and her architect husband were going away and offered to let the brothers stay in their tasteful flat, where we would eat a Christmas duck the older brother sprang for, which I had no idea would take so long to roast. We waited for hours till the brother got so impatient he went and turned up the oven heat, which worked. I had the feeling neither brother liked me. They were both better off than Amir—one an academic in Europe, though I wasn’t sure where, the other with some kind of hustle I never understood—but I actually thought neither was as smart as Amir, and I wasn’t sure they knew it.

The older brother, Salim, was the one who’d lived in London, and his many English friends, including some I’d met, kept giving him parties. There were quite a few Americans at these parties, but they didn’t make me feel more comfortable than the English did. They were the kind of hippie I didn’t understand, less hair more money, and always that obligatory pot which I didn’t know how to decline though it made my shakes worse than ever.

I tried to talk to one of these Americans about my problem—she was a self-possessed young woman in some wool outfit you could wear to work, not looking like a hippie at all, though stoned out of her gourd—and she said, “Well, if I started to shake, I’d just get into it. I’d just shake and shake.”

That was a big help. Come on—I wouldn’t shake and shake on purpose even when I was alone, let alone in a room full of strangers. Much later, after I had learned to understand pot, I might have done that. But by then I’d have stopped getting the shakes when I smoked pot. So what would have been the point?

I talked to one American guy, hip but not a hippie, about whatever music was playing, and he mentioned Janis Joplin and was so amazed I hadn’t heard of her that he acted like that New Zealand student who’d said, “No! You haven’t read Margaret Drabble?” He just put headphones on my head and a joint in my mouth. What came through my mouth would have seemed strong whatever it was, but whether it was strong or mild, or had a touch of hash or fabled Lebanese blond or any of those things I hadn’t heard about yet, what blew me away was what came through my ears, first a guitar lead, languid, wistful, winding, and then! Pow pow pow! It was like I’d been hit by so much voltage it took a minute to realize this was just a song I’d known all my life, that old Gershwin-Negro jam up, exploded and derailed and rerouted to a sound I’d never heard before, the voice of Janis Joplin singing “Summertime.” It fucking curled my hair.

It wasn’t even two months later that I actually saw Janis live in New York at the Fillmore East. A friend’s boyfriend had got tickets. The opening act was the Grateful Dead! I didn’t understand the Dead—I thought they were too slow. But the minute Janis came on the room went electric. The crowd was screaming. I remember her pleading with the crowd, “Please, please don’t make me do ‘Ball and Chain’ again!” But they did. And she did. Ball and Chain. I felt as if I’d put my hand right in an open electrical socket.

There was one last bit of music I ran into in that stretch of time. One bitterly cold January afternoon, probably on our way to the American embassy for something to do with Amir’s immigration, we came upon a crowd of people standing on the sidewalk looking up and heard a sound so loud the buildings seemed to shake. Amir and I stood there for a while and looked up too. Then we went on our way.

It was only when I saw the documentary Let It Be where a bearded Paul McCartney sings “Get Back!” that I realized it had been the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert that I’d heard from the street that afternoon, not knowing what it was. I wasn’t on the roof with the Beatles and the wives and girlfriends and beautiful people who were part of it. I was on the street with the regular people, the passersby. Those were my people—passersby on the street, looking up. We knew something was happening. We didn’t know what it was.

I checked the date of that rooftop Beatles concert Amir and I and those passersby heard from the street. January 30, 1969. The Fillmore show was a two-day deal, February 11 and 12. So it would have been sometime between January 30 and February 11 or 12 that I flew back to New York, alone.