Janis joplin interracial dating

WHEN you're fifteen years old, when Leonard Bernstein features you on national television, when your first single charts in the top ten, garnering a Grammy nomination, and The New York Times anoints you a "radiant new talent," what do you do for an encore? Most child prodigies fade quickly from view, but Janis Ian is thriving some forty years later, though not without some intense struggle in the interim, as detailed in her new autobiography.

Born a red diaper baby (the child of Communists) on a chicken farm in New Jersey, Ian began playing the piano at three, wrote her first song at twelve, and was performing at hootenannies in New York's Greenwich Village one year later. At fourteen, this wunderkind walked into pop producer Shadow Morton's office, and the very next week she recorded her controversial folk ballad about interracial dating, "Society's Child." The year was 1967. David Geffen was her agent, The Byrds opened for her on tour, she shopped with Janis Joplin, did cocaine with Jimi Hendrix, and performed on the TV shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, and the Smothers Brothers. Life magazine followed her around, seeking photos of Janis "acting like a teenager" to intersperse with pictures of her onstage and in TV studios.

These were perplexing times for this woman child, who in a few short years would crash and burn, sequestering herself in Philadelphia to recover from emotional exhaustion. Three years later, after lots of "intensive therapy," Roberta Flack had a hit with her Jesse and Ian returned to the music business, eventually selling over ten million records and earning multiple Grammy awards with such songs as the iconic lament "At Seventeen," the disco hit "Fly Too High," and a jazz duet with Mel Torme called "Silly Habits."

This autobiography catapults the reader along the author's career trajectory. When "At Seventeen" began to get radio play, she and the band initially drove a station wagon from one 200-seat club to another. Then a month later, they were playing 2,000-seat theaters, and a month after that, 5,000-seat auditoriums. By now they were being shuttled around in tour buses and limousines. In this mid-70's period, she lived openly with girlfriends and was "outed" by The Village Voice, to the consternation of her record label. The drugs, sex, and isolation on the road are intimately captured with unvarnished clarity and insight.

Throughout the book, Ian entertains us with marvelously gossipy bits about Donovan, Laura Nyro, Frank Zappa, James Brown, and Nina Simone. Even more powerful are her observations about her own survival over the years. She walked away from music again in the early 80's, thinking she had enough money and wanting to settle down and start a family with a man. However, this idyll spiraled into tragedy: her husband showed increasing signs of psychosis, financial malfeasance by her bookkeeper left her penniless and owing $1.3 million to the IRS, and two emergency surgeries robbed her of her health.

Ian's writing about this later bottoming out period is particularly compelling, as she helps us understand her abusive relationship with her Valium-addled husband, whom she left only after he hit her and held a gun to her head for hours. Even then, she mourned the end of their relationship. Of this dark period she writes: "I thought I was exempt, too. I wasn't like 'those women.' Those women, battered women, were stupid. Uneducated. Ignorant. Poor. I was just the opposite. I had everything going for me--success, brains, money. And still, I was seduced, and reduced, until after seven years with him, part of me honestly thought I was stupid, uneducated, and useless."

Ian's story doesn't end there. She goes on to chronicle her salvation and eventual renaissance through the love of her female partner of the last twenty years. Ian returned to recording and performing in the 90's and branched out to write columns for The Advocate and Performing Songwriter, as well as science fiction. Her autobiographical journey concludes on a joyous and hopeful note: "How much wonder there is to treasure in this life! Even winter, with its long nights and frigid days, would be welcome now. I would take joy in every gust of wind, every snowflake that might fall. Because I was alive, and that was the greatest gift of all."

John R. Killacky is an arts administrator and writer in San Francisco.

Society's Child: My Autobiography

by Janis lan

Tarcher/Penguin. 348 pages, $26.95