by Arnold Levine...
For me, the end began one early evening in London in August 1970. On the way from my flat above the notorious Mangrove Cafe in Ladbroke Grove, I emerged from Kings Cross Station to catch a bus to my parent's house at Parliament Hill Fields. I was preparing to go on a summer car trip to Europe with my old school friend and flatmate Jeffrey. At the corner of Kings Cross Road and Euston Road was a makeshift newspaper kiosk huddled against the entry steps and the fluted columns of the superb Victorian folly of St. Pancras Railway Station. In front of the kiosk I saw large black headlines on the white Evening Standard teaser board with its thin, transient paper edges flapping in the gentle breeze through the wire holding frame. "Famous Woman Rock Singer Dies". Oh dear, who was it now? So many had crashed and burned since the onset of the Beatle-led cultural revolution started in 1962. I reluctantly walked over to the kiosk and looked down at the tabloid-size newspapers piled neatly on the counter.

 My heart sank down to my plimsolls  "Not her! No! Not Janis!" The bored newspaper seller ignored my outburst. I gave him the sixpence. The bad/great girl of rock, the singer whom many of us guys secretly wanted to take in our arms and protect from the world that was eating her up; was dead. Janis was just another rock-star cliché in the end. Her immense talent and future wasted, the potential barely tapped, just like the youth movement she helped define and inspire. Even uber-smashed Lady Day had left a substantial catalogue for us to cry over. Watching Janis Joplin cry, laugh, emote and live through each song she sang, had always given me a spine-tingling experience like no other. Her voice seemed to split into a chorus of separate, different voices when she screamed with pain and then softly sighed with love for us all. I never saw her perform live, I saw her on the Monterey Pop film, the recent Festival Express, and some other contemporary TV shows she appeared in, she certainly was not a typical beauty; she had bad skin, she drank too much, but her inner vulnerability gave her a powerful outward glamour. I played her vinyl albums hard to their scratchy end, just like Janis herself.  

I had just turned twenty, and it was getting hard to hold onto the idealistic dreams of the late sixties with our heroes dying or being imprisoned almost daily.  Governments feared the growing youth movement they, the Churches or parents had no control over. Their old-system of "keep quiet" conformity was not working anymore with us. The awaking information age now showed us all we needed to know about how the world was really being run and by whom. The lurid moral turpitude and revolutionary spirit seen by the powers-that-be branching out from this growing awareness, had shocked the establishment to its calcified roots and they reared back with harsher laws, brutality and fewer civil liberties.
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