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Janis Joplin

American singer (1943–1970)

Janis Lyn Joplin (19 January 1943 – 4 October 1970) was an American singer and songwriter.

I don’t want much outa life,
I never wanted a mansion in the south.
I just-a want to find someone sincere
Who’d treat me like he talks,
One good man.

Quotes

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Music’s for grooving man, and music’s not for puttin’ yourself through bad changes, y’know?
  • Music’s for grooving man, and music’s not for puttin’ yourself through bad changes, y’know? I mean, you don’t have to go take anybody’s shit, man, just to like music, y’know what I mean? You don’t. So... so if you’re getting’ more shit than you deserve, you know what to do about it man. Y’know, it’s just music. Music’s... music's s’posed to be different than that.
    • Spoken on the live recording of "Piece Of My Heart" on "Cheap Thrills" (1968)
  • Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week. In MY week.
    • On being shunted off the front page of Newsweek magazine by the late ex-President Dwight D. Eisenhower following his death; New Musical Express interview, (12 April 1969); cited in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
  • Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same fucking day, man.
    • Comments on a performance of "Ball and Chain" Festival Express (1970)

I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969)

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Honey, I love to go to parties,
And I like to have a good time,
But if it gets too pale after a while
Honey and I start looking to find
One good man.
  • Time keeps movin' on,
    Friends they turn away.
    I keep movin' on
    But I never found out why
    I keep pushing so hard the dream,
    I keep tryin to make it right
    Through another lonely day, whoaa.
  • Dawn has come at last,
    Twenty-five years, honey just in one night, oh yeah.
    Well, Im twenty-five years older now
    So I know we can't be right
    And Im no better, baby,
    And I cant help you no more
    Than I did when just a girl.
    • "Kozmic Blues", co-written with Gabriel Mekler
  • Aww, but it don't make no difference, baby, no, no,
    And I know that I could always try.
    It don't make no difference, baby, yeah,
    I better hold it now,
    I better need it, yeah,
    Im gonna use it till the day I die, whoa.
    • "Kozmic Blues", co-written with Gabriel Mekler
  • Don't expect any answers, dear,
    For I know that they don't come with age, no, no.
    Well, ain't never gonna love you any better, babe.
    And I'm never gonna love you right,
    So you'd better take it now, and right now.
    • "Kozmic Blues", co-written with Gabriel Mekler
  • Oh! But it don't make no difference, babe, hey,
    And I know that I could always try.
    Theres a fire inside everyone of us,
    You'd better need it now,
    I got to hold it, yeah,
    I better use it till the day I die.
    • "Kozmic Blues", co-written with Gabriel Mekler
  • Honey, I love to go to parties,
    And I like to have a good time,
    But if it gets too pale after a while
    Honey and I start looking to find
    One good man.
    • "One Good Man"
  • One good man,
    Oh ain’t much, honey ain’t much,
    It’s only everything...
    • "One Good Man"
  • An’ I don’t want much outa life,
    I never wanted a mansion in the south.
    I just-a want to find someone sincere
    Who’d treat me like he talks,
    One good man.
    • "One Good Man"

Pearl (1971)

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Please don'tcha do it to me baby,
Either take this love I offer
Or honey let me be.
 
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends
  • You say that it's over baby, Lord,
    You say that it's over now,
    But still you hang around me, come on,
    Won't you move over.
  • You know that I need a man, honey Lord,
    You know that I need a man,
    But when I ask you to you just tell me
    That maybe you can.
    • "Move Over"
  • Please don'tcha do it to me babe, no!
    Please don'tcha do it to me baby,
    Either take this love I offer
    Or honey let me be.
    • "Move Over"
  • Oh yeah, make up your mind, honey,
    You're playing with me, hey hey hey,
    Make up your mind, darling,
    You're playing with me, come on now!
    Now either be my loving man,
    I said-a let me honey, let me be, yeah!
    • "Move Over"
  • Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends
    • "Mercedes Benz", co-written with Bob Neuwirth in 1970, inspired by the first line of a song by Michael McClure: "Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz."


Misattributed

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Come on, come on and take it,
Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!
 
I've looked everywhere
And I can't find me anybody to love,
To feel my care.
  • Well, I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.
    I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it,
    Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!
    • "Piece of My Heart" (1968); though this song became well known because of her performances, and as one of her greatest hits, it was actually written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns · Live performance in Germany (1968)
  • You know you got it if it makes you feel good.
    • "Piece of My Heart" (1968) written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns
  • Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,
    Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free...
    And feeling good was easy, lord, when he sang the blues.
    You know feeling good was good enough for me,
    Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

Quotes about Joplin

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I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet… ~ Leonard Cohen
 
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you'd make an exception. ~ Leonard Cohen
 
Janis knew more than I did about "how it was", but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles. ~ Grace Slick
  • Ah, but you got away, didn't you baby
    You just threw it all to the ground
    You got away, they can’t pay you now
    For making your sweet little sound, can they?
    Making your sweet little sound on the jukebox
    Making your sweet little sound on the jukebox
    Making your sweet little sound on the radio
    Making your sweet little sound.
  • Ah but you got away, didn't you babe
    You just turned your back on the crowd
    You got away, I never once heard you say
    I need you, I don't need you
    I need you, I don't need you
    And all of that jiving around.
  • I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
    You were famous, your heart was a legend
    You told me again you preferred handsome men
    But for me you'd make an exception.

    And clenching your fist for the ones like us
    Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
    You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind,
    We are ugly but we have the music."
  • Janis knew more than I did about "how it was", but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles. She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled with a regularity that took me thirty years to experience or understand. On the various occasions when we were together, she seemed to be holding in something she thought I might not want to hear, like older people do when they hear kids they love saying with absolute youthful confidence, "Oh, that'll never happen to me." Sometimes you know you can't tell them how it is, they have to find out for themselves. Janis felt like an old soul, a wisecracking grandmother whom everybody loved to visit. When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family, a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry to hear wisdom.
    Did we compliment each other? Yes, but not often enough.
    • Grace Slick, in Somebody to Love? : A Rock-and-Roll Memoir (1998) by Grace Slick and Andrea Cagan
  • A banker's daughter or a runaway girl,
    A little lady or a honky-tonk Pearl
    Has to find someplace in this world
    Where she feels at home.

    A banker's daughter is so hard to deceive
    A little lady is so hard to please
    Honky-tonk Pearl wears her heart on her sleeve,
    And her heart will not grow cold.
  • Here's a wish for a runaway girl;
    Here's a prayer for honky-tonk Pearl —
    Hope she finds someplace outta this world
    Where she feels at home.
  • "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" is as good an epitaph for the counterculture as any; we'll never know how-or if-Janis meant to go on from there. Janis Joplin's death, like that of a fighter in the ring, was not exactly an accident. Yet it's too easy to label it either suicide or murder, though it involved elements of both. Call it rather an inherent risk of the game she was playing, a game whose often frivolous rules both hid and revealed a deadly serious struggle. The form that struggle took was incomplete, shortsighted, egotistical, self-destructive. But survivors who give in to the temptation to feel superior to all that are in the end no better than those who romanticize it. Janis was not so much a victim as a casualty. The difference matters.
    • Ellen Willis 1976 article in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
  • You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.
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