Scars of Sweet Paradise is an excellent biography of Janis Joplin. I'll sum up the book with a line from a song by another '60's phenomenon-The Doors (Janis and Jim Morrison apparently disliked each other intensely): "Never saw a woman/So alone." Of all the people, men and women, who blew through her life as friends and/or lovers, it seems that no one was ever able to give her the one thing she really craved-the feeling that someone loved her just for who she was.
There are parts of the book that seem to get a little repetitive and/or contradictory, but I think that that's just a function of Echols' trying to juggle the many, often contradictory and probably hazily-remembered accounts of various aspects of Janis' life by those who knew her. Janis' relationships with women (about which she seemed to remain conflicted in some ways) put her that much farther left of the left at that time, when heterosexuality was still considered the norm even in Haight-Ashbury). And she had that voice, and that larger-than-life personality, and the audacity to be a badass woman at a time when even among the people on the fringes, a woman was still expected to be little more than a man's "old lady"-a gentle, quiet earth-mama (the book is peppered with references to the fact that Janis was loud, and considered by many to be physically unattractive-even "fat"). Janis, of course, embodied that authenticity and near-frantic drive to find meaning on the edges of things.
Instead, she provides an in-depth look at the real '60's from historical and cultural perspectives, explaining how the "hippie" phenomenon began as a truly creative impulse to flee the staid conventionality of the '50's and find what was "authentic" in art, music, and life itself, and was inevitably co-opted by the media and those seeking to profit from it so that it became little more than a fashion statement (it burst a lot of my hippie-wannabe bubbles). Echols, refreshingly, refrains for the most part from the armchair psychoanalysis and sordid, shock-value "journalism" that so many biographers (especially, it seems, biographers of musicians) employ to drum up enthusiasm for their books. I'll do the obvious here and say that a little piece of my heart broke on just about every page of Alice Echols' biography of Janis Joplin.
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