She’d spent five years being sold as chaos in a boa. Then, three nights before she died, Janis Joplin walked into a Los Angeles studio and cut a joke of a song, sixty seconds long, mostly a cappella, and it might be the most confident thing she ever recorded.
That’s “Mercedes Benz,” laid down on October 1, 1970. Three days later, on October 4, road manager John Cooke found her on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood. She was 27. The official cause was acute heroin intoxication, from a batch strong enough that other customers of the same dealer overdosed that same week. Sixteen days earlier, Jimi Hendrix had died at the same age. The 27 Club got its patron saint by that October, but the tragic cliche has always undersold what actually happened that week in 1970.
Here’s the case for a different read. By 1970, Joplin had finally built the band she wanted. The Full Tilt Boogie Band wasn’t Big Brother and the Holding Company, and it wasn’t the Kozmic Blues horn section either, it was tighter, meaner, assembled to her specs after two prior bands got built around her instead of by her. She’d stopped playing the wild woman for the cameras and started actually producing her own record, hands on every arrangement. “It’s my band,” she reportedly said. “Finally it’s my band.” That is not the language of somebody spiraling. That’s an artist who had just gotten the wheel and was three days from finishing the drive.
Pearl came out in January 1971, unfinished (one track has no vocal at all, an instrumental gap where her voice should be), and it still became the best selling album of her career, a number one record. Fans and critics have spent decades treating it as a eulogy. It plays more like a thesis statement that got cut off mid sentence. If you’ve only ever heard “Me and Bobby McGee,” go back and put on the whole thing and ask yourself whether that sounds like someone at the end of something, or the beginning of it.
The rest of the week does not let up. Bad Company’s self-titled debut hit number one on the Billboard 200 on September 28, 1974, proof that a supergroup built from the wreckage of Free, Mott the Hoople and King Crimson could out-swagger all three source bands combined. The next night, in 1978, Black Sabbath released Never Say Die!, the last album the original lineup ever made with Ozzy Osbourne before his firing eight months later. Ozzy called it the worst thing he ever recorded, and Geezer Butler agreed. They’re both too close to it to judge fairly; strip away the band drama, and there’s a version of that record that’s misunderstood rather than bad.
September 30 gave us two kinds of comeback energy. Marc Bolan was born in 1947, years before he’d invent glam rock’s silhouette and hand David Bowie, and every hair metal band after him, a blueprint for turning rock stardom into theater. And in 1997, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind, the album that dragged him from irrelevance back to the Grammy stage (it won Album of the Year), proof a career declared finished can just be resting.
Then there’s Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, released October 2, 1970, the band’s first ever UK number one album, which Gilmour and Waters have both since trashed in public. Gilmour called it “a load of rubbish.” Waters said he would not play it again for a million pounds. A number one album the band itself disowns raises a real question about who gets the final word on whether a record holds up: the people who bought it, or the people who made it.
Round out the week with Stevie Ray Vaughan, born October 3, 1954, the guy who singlehandedly made blues guitar commercially viable again in an MTV decade that had mostly forgotten it existed.
So here’s the actual debate. Was Janis Joplin cut down mid tragedy, or mid triumph? And separately: does a band get to disown its own number one record, or does the audience have the last word? Argue it out in the comments.
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