Pearl (June–October 1970)
During Joplin's June 1970 concert tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she told Rolling Stone magazine journalist David Dalton and others that four years earlier, Travis Rivers had seduced her and slept with her so she would feel obligated to join Big Brother, and the story was false, according to many Joplin biographers including Myra Friedman.
Joplin's friends, including Friedman, had admired for years the honesty she displayed in conversations with them. She never seemed phony. In 1970, they became dismayed when they noticed she was starting to make up stories about herself to enhance a public image as a "zany" (Friedman's description) sex symbol who was constantly searching for a man to love her. Joplin's March 20 statement to Rolling Stone that she and David Niehaus were "going into the jungle" was not true. On June 25, Dick Cavett said to her on-camera, "When last I heard of you, you were in the jungles of Brazil, or maybe not the jungles."
From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour where a train transported musicians across Canada, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Footage of her performance of "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s.
David Dalton was part of Joplin's entourage throughout her June 1970 concerts in the United States and on board the Festival Express train. After her death, he made transcripts of numerous cassette tapes on which he had recorded her speaking. Dalton eventually lost all the recordings except for the Festival Express train conversation between Joplin and Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie. Dalton's last cassette expired moments after Joplin's over-the-top comment to Bramlett, "All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik – meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time... I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock'n'roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me."
Among Joplin's last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show. In her June 25, 1970, appearance, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state". On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union. On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, a registered nurse who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith—was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. Joplin had frequently cited Bessie Smith as a musical influence. The lead paragraph of an Associated Press story said Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, Joplin and Green never met. Joplin was at home when she received a phone call from someone who explained the situation with Smith's gravesite, and she mailed a check to contribute to the new marker.
During this time, she first performed "Mercedes Benz", a song partially inspired by a Michael McClure poem, that she had composed with fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth a very short time earlier which would be released on Pearl. According to Myra Friedman's account, Joplin performed two shows at the Capitol Theatre, the first of which was attended by actors Geraldine Page and her husband Rip Torn. Between the shows, at a "gin mill" [Friedman's words] close to this concert venue, Joplin and Neuwirth penned the lyrics to the song and she performed it at the second show, according to Friedman.
Neuwirth was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in 2015: "Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before [acts that opened for Joplin] Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us [Joplin, Neuwirth, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn] walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen's [at 30 Broad Street in Port Chester]." While in Vahsen's, "Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse [for "Mercedes Benz"], too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round."
Joplin's last public performance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. The Harvard Crimson gave the performance a positive, front-page review, despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had performed with makeshift amplifiers after their regular sound equipment was stolen in Boston. Joplin attended her high school reunion on August 14, accompanied by Neuwirth, road manager John Byrne Cooke, and sister Laura, but it was reportedly an unhappy experience for her. Joplin denigrated Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier.
Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She and Morgan were engaged to be married in early September, although he visited Sunset Sound Recorders for just eight of Joplin's many rehearsals and sessions. During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was enough usable material to compile an LP. The posthumous Pearl (1971) became the biggest-selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's "Me and Bobby McGee" (Kristofferson had previously been one of Joplin's lovers, though the song was taught to her by Neuwirth). The opening track, "Move Over", was written by Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships.
Peggy Caserta claimed in her book Going Down with Janis (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant and owner of Mnasidika, one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users. During Joplin's stay at the Landmark, she learned of Caserta's presence at the Landmark from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there. Joplin begged Caserta for heroin, and when Caserta refused to provide it, Joplin reportedly admonished her by saying, "Don't think if you can get it, I can't get it." Joplin's publicist Myra Friedman was unaware during Joplin's lifetime that this had happened. Later, while Friedman was working on her book Buried Alive, she determined that the time frame of the Joplin–Caserta encounter was one week before Jimi Hendrix's death. Within a few days, Joplin became a regular customer of the same heroin dealer who had been supplying Caserta.
Joplin's manager Albert Grossman and his assistant/publicist Friedman had staged an intervention with Joplin the previous winter while Joplin was in New York. Grossman and Friedman knew during Joplin's lifetime that her friend Caserta, whom Friedman had met during the New York sessions for Cheap Thrills and on later occasions, used heroin. In September 1970, Friedman assumed Caserta had been out of Joplin's life for a while. Both Friedman and Grossman lived in New York, and did not visit California during this time frame. When Joplin was not at Sunset Sound Recorders, she liked to drive her Porsche over the speed limit "on the winding part of Sunset Blvd.", according to a statement made by her attorney Robert Gordon in 1995 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Friedman wrote that the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, Ken Pearson, often hesitated to join her, though he did on the night she died. He was not interested in using hard drugs. On September 26, 1970, Joplin recorded vocals for "Half Moon" and "Cry Baby". The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon with the Dale Evans composition "Happy Trails" as part of the greeting.
On October 1, 1970, Joplin completed her last recording, "Mercedes Benz", which was recorded in a single take. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song "Buried Alive in the Blues", which the band had recorded earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day. Sometime on Saturday, she learned that her boyfriend Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant, and invited them to her home. People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Joplin expressing anger about Morgan's actions, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions. Joplin and Ken Pearson later left the studio together and she drove him in her Porsche to the West Hollywood venue called Barney's Beanery, where they met Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman. After midnight, she drove Ken Pearson and a male fan from Barney's Beanery to the Landmark Motor Hotel. During the ride, the fan repeatedly asked her about her singing style, and "she mostly ignored him," as Pearson told Myra Friedman. After arriving at the Landmark, where she and Pearson were staying in separate rooms, they prepared to part in the lobby of the Landmark, when she expressed a fear, possibly in jest, that he and the other Full Tilt Boogie musicians might decide to stop making music with her. Then they separated and went to their rooms.
