Janis Joplin, San Francisco, CA © 1968 Bruce Steinberg After I showed Janis the photos I’d taken of her at the San Jose Pop Festival, she invited me to come shoot her and Big Brother playing their first gig in a few weeks at Bill Graham’s new Carousel Ballroom (subsequently to become the Fillmore West) to which he had recently moved his concert operations from the old Fillmore Auditorium on Geary Street.She’d given me the name and number of her new management company in New York and suggested I get in touch with them regarding any new photos of her that I thought might be useful. I never even showed Janis what I’d shot at the Carousel that night. I just sent her people what I thought were the best images on spec for review, and didn’t give it much more thought after that. There was nothing in particular I was going to do with the photos on my own, and I figured with both her management and Columbia Records, the band’s label, in New York, that was as good a place as any for my photos to be on file.What I didn’t fully realize at the time was that her new management was already planning her leaving Big Brother and launching a solo career. I’d almost forgotten that those slides were back east until one day when I was on the phone with Columbia’s head art director in New York regarding a photo assignment I’d done in Carmel to update the cover art for Erroll Garner’s classic 1956 LP, “Concert by the Sea.” He said, “Oh, by the way, you need to send me an invoice for a photo of yours we’re going to be using for another cover.” I didn’t recall having sent Columbia any photos on spec recently, and thought he might have me confused with someone else.When I asked him whose cover he was talking about, he said, “I don’t remember her name offhand – some hippie chick singer from San Francisco.” He was an urbane New Yorker in the CBS Building on West 52nd Street that was most often referred to the Black Rock. I’d come to realize that his resonance with American pop culture stopped somewhere short of the Hudson River, and it slowly dawned on me whom it might be he was talking about. I hesitantly asked him, “Um, do you mean Janis… Joplin…?”“Yeah, that’s it,” he said, “Janis… whatever.” I asked him how my photo of her had wound up in contention, let alone having been chosen. “I don’t know how it got here,” he snapped impatiently. “All I know is we had about 7,000 slides of her and we threw them all out on a light table one day when she came up here and she picked out that one. I think she liked the color and the movement even if you can’t tell what she looks like. Send me a bill.”As I let it all settle in, it occurred to me that he was probably
onto something profound. Janis, never secure about herself or her looks,
probably would be drawn to a photo that celebrated her unique passion
and energy in explosive color and frenzied motion without revealing
anything else. She always said she lived for those two hours on stage,
and although it wasn’t even a live album, she’d picked a
live photo -- and a grainy, blurry one at that. For her own coming-out
party, her debut solo album, Janis succeeded in remaining hidden in
plain sight.
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