It's Janis who will go on -- and on

I see where Hillary has selected that hideous Celine Dion wail from Titanic as her campaign theme ditty. Well, that should cost her all her Canadian votes. Oh wait, she doesn’t have any. Well, if there is any justice, it should cost her any American votes that might come from people with taste and discernment who don’t necessarily regard Vegas as a Mecca of Western Culture.

At least, that’s my opinion.

Awkward and maybe even illogical segue here: If Hillary wanted to choose a real song then she couldn’t have gone wrong with Joplin’s Piece of My Heart. Who knows, she might even be able to relate to this musical ‘poem’ of pain, love, lost love, deceit, angst, and huge, huge passion. Or not.

Anybody who has ever been ‘there’ knows what this song is about. Added to which, anybody who has ever been there also knows that it ‘must’ be sung by poor Janis. That’s because Janis wasn’t a mere singer or stylist, but rather the epitome of all the pain any of us have ever felt on long lonely nights waiting, hoping, and ultimately being destroyed by somebody who didn’t feel ‘it’ the way we did.

Janis was heart, soul and guts. She was a fuckup of a human-being, and it was only in being this fuckup that she was able to smash and eviscerate anyone who tried to get on that same bandwagon. The only one who ever came close were her predecessors, Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf or, over on the male side, Hank Williams. To be noted, none of the aforementioned lived very long. How could they? All were victims of substance excess, because that, for them, seemed to be the only way to make the pain go away.

That, and the music.

And the fact that she has been dead for 37 years matters not at all. That is the mark of true artistry; it is universal and timeless.

I’ve read that they’ve made a number of attempts to mount a movie version of Janis’s life. I hope they don’t succeed. They could do no justice to the story of the bluesy, boozy girl from Lake Jackson, Texas who, for a brief period of God’s grace made it big and became a much more deserving musical icon of that screwed-up late ‘60s era than many lesser and more commercial musicians.

Watch Janis on the Monterey Pop film and watch the camera pan in on ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot who is enraptured by this person she has never seen or heart before. Watch Cass’s lips form the phrase: “Oh, wow!” for that utterance said it all.

I came to this because I found a Youtube offering of Piece of My Heart (I wanted to download it here, but I haven't yet figured out how to do that) and it’s still a bit of music from a certain time, and it can still make me misty.

According to a story, Janis believed that Kris Kristofferson penned Me and Bobby McGee specifically for Janis (it was her last big hit) because he was in love with her. He did indeed write it with her in mind but, alas, no it was not because he was in love with her, but because he thought she would be the best person to sing it.

For her to have construed it as a love message is pure Janis. That was why she was so sad -- and so wonderful.