‘She knew where she wanted to go – and just kept going’: the real Janis Joplin, by those closest to her

‘Janis Joplin is important to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, and it’s not my job to tell them that they’re wrong.” It’s 8am in Tucson, Arizona, and the late singer’s brother Michael is being diplomatic as he considers the legacy of an era-defining woman who so many people feel they know. But he has a job to do nonetheless: “When she passed, I had an obligation to protect her history,” he says, against a backdrop of gleaming gold and silver records.

Michael was only 17 when Joplin was found dead of a heroin overdose, aged 27, on the floor of a hotel room in Los Angeles. Fifty-four years later, journalists such as I are still knocking on his door, searching for new insight into the life of a singer whom the talkshow host Dick Cavett once introduced as “a combination of Leadbelly, a steam engine, Calamity Jane and Bessie Smith”.

The tale of the wide-eyed Texan who ran away to the beatnik hills of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood – and became a poster woman for the Summer of Love as a result – remains popular: a musical dramatising Joplin’s life, A Night With Janis Joplin, opened on Broadway in 2011 and arrives in London in August. “Janis is like a Shakespearean story in a lot of ways,” Michael says. “It’s a perfect scenario of redemption and loss.”

There were so many twists and turns in just four years of recorded music. In the summer of 1966, Joplin joined the psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, fusing her tempestuous folk-blues sound to the group’s acid-drenched reworkings of Erma Franklin’s ballad Piece of My Heart, Big Mama Thornton’s sweltering blues classic Ball and Chain, and George Gershwin’s languid aria Summertime. A pivotal performance at Monterey pop festival in 1967 launched her as an overnight star. But beneath the hyperbole (“she slinks like tar, scowls like war,” Vogue declared in 1968) was a deeply cerebral woman heading down a path of drug use and alcoholism.

Joplin’s life is still defined by how she died – she’s inevitably invoked in discussions of pop’s notorious “27 club” of people who died at that age – and yet we should return to her songs to glean insight into how she lived. She didn’t just sing the blues, she felt them too. As Randy Johnson, the writer and director of the stage musical, puts it: “She made it OK to be yourself. We came out of that 1950s Betty Crocker period” – of housewives and repressed emotion – “and all of a sudden there was this prophet called Janis Joplin.”

Johnson’s “rock and blues opera”, as he calls it, features Joplin songs alongside ones by her influences: Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Odetta, Nina Simone and Bessie Smith. It’s also guided by Michael and his sister Laura and centres on her family dynamic, which Johnson hails as “as authentic as you could possibly get”. Cleaning day in the Joplin household was always set to music, he tells me – and it’s intimate scenes such as this that inform the production’s story. Joplin’s mother, Dorothy, “loved to play show tunes, so they would clean to West Side Story and play all the parts”.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, by her teens Joplin felt at odds with her surroundings, routinely bullied at school for the attributes that set her apart: the beatnik clothing, her love of the blues, the acne that blighted her skin. “She rocked the boat in a very small conservative town,” Michael says. “There were ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ restrooms. She spoke up against that. And in that town, that was tough.” She was also curious about her sexuality, and had relationships with both men and women. “That was an extra burden that made her more conscious and aware.”