{"id":931813,"date":"2026-05-02T00:46:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/931813\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T00:46:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:46:16","slug":"janis-joplin-the-didion-dunnes-and-peyote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/931813\/","title":{"rendered":"Janis Joplin, The Didion-Dunnes and peyote"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Janis<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Kathleen Ballard \/ UCLA Library \/ Albert B. Grossman Management<\/p>\n

\u201cJanis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high,\u201d Joan Didion<\/a> wrote in 1967\u2019s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her observation of the dark side of San Francisco\u2019s counterculture, \u201cand it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o\u2019clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

While Joplin was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, she would become synonymous with San Francisco from when she first moved there in 1964, hitchhiking her way from home with her friend, Chet Helms (soon to be known as the unofficial \u2018father\u2019 of the Summer of Love and the founder\/manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company). It was during this summer, in 1967, that Didion would find herself wandering, desperately seeking an answer to the disarray that she saw underneath the culture\u2019s guise of peace and love. Under her gaze, San Francisco was wholly exposed and dissected, and Joplin, as one of its stars, was one of Didion\u2019s many subjects.<\/p>\n

In the interim from her arrival in San Francisco and the so-called Summer of Love, Joplin had made her reputation in the city<\/a>, both as a singer and a personality. She began recording blues standards with future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, but, at the same time, her substance abuse began to escalate. For the next two years, Joplin\u2019s drinking increased, while she took an array of psychoactive drugs and amphetamines, and occasionally used heroin.\u00a0In 1965, her friends eventually convinced her to return to Port Arthur, where she remained sober and recorded songs on her own, accompanied by her acoustic guitar. However, once Helms came knocking on her door with the opportunity to join Big Brother, she found her way back to San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Some two years later, as Joplin\u2019s stardom began to ascend in anticipation of Big Brother\u2019s debut album, hers and Didion\u2019s paths would first cross, as Joplin caught the latter\u2019s ear on the outskirts of Golden Gate Park, her voice was, in a way, the soundtrack of the counterculture, as booming and evocative as it was, and her presence as a larger-than-life personality, charming and clever, made her a figure that was difficult to ignore. Before Big Brother\u2019s debut and their breakout performance at that summer\u2019s Monterey Pop Festival, she was already an icon in the making, and Didion took notice<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The two women\u2019s paths would cross again within the next year or so. While on the surface, their personalities were vastly different, one an eccentric rockstar and the other an insular journalist, they ran somewhat in the same circles: Joplin, of course, being among fellow rock musicians and Didion, as a writer, profiling musicians. \u201cRock and roll musicians are the ideal subject for me,\u201d the writer once said, \u201cThey would just lead their lives in front of you\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, they overlapped socially, and it was through this that they would properly meet at the writer\u2019s home with her husband, John Gregory Dunne and daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in Los Angeles, where the couple had moved in 1964 and adopted their daughter two years later, making their home on Franklin Avenue<\/a>, a space which became the stomping grounds of every facet of artist one can think of: musicians and writers, alike, alongside painters, actors, directors and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Joan<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

One of the many parties thrown at the Didion-Dunne household was in celebration of Tom Wolfe. As Dunne recalled to The Guardian<\/a> in 2003, \u201cIt was the launch for one of his books\u201d. Indeed, Wolfe\u2019s nonfiction work, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was about to be published in the summer of 1968. What better place to celebrate its arrival than at the home of his fellow New Journalism pioneer in Didion, where inevitably, everyone worth knowing in Los Angeles would arrive?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The party quickly turned raucous, \u201ca fucking zoo\u201d, as Dunne described, by the time that Joplin arrived at around 10:30 at night. At some point, an unknown culprit presented drugs as a party favour, and word got back to Didion that they were available upstairs, where her daughter, Quintana, was asleep. As Susanna Moore, a friend of the Didion-Dunnes, recounted in her 2020 memoir, Miss Aluminum, Didion ran upstairs to find guests dispensing peyote in the hallway, right outside Quintana\u2019s bedroom. \u201cWhen she asked them to leave,\u201d Moore wrote, \u201ca musician who had come with Janis Joplin said, \u2018You don\u2019t know who you\u2019re missing, babe\u2019, and Joan, following them down the stairs to the front door, said, \u2018Yes, I do\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat party was\u2026 maybe the biggest party we\u2019d ever had,\u201d Didion recalled of the night in her documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne<\/a>, describing it as \u201cthe horrible thing I remember\u2026 I couldn\u2019t believe that anybody would do that. There were a lot of drugs around town at that time, and the presence of these drugs became all that was on anybody\u2019s mind. You wanted to get rid of them; you wanted to get them out of your house.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked by Vice<\/a>, upon the documentary\u2019s release, of instances where Griffin felt the need to look at moments of his relationship with his aunt from a journalistic lens, for the sake of the film, he cited the night with Joplin. \u201cI talked about being at the Janis party, and I talked to Joan about being there,\u201d he explained, \u201cI was 11 years old, and it made a huge impression on me, this party, so much so that the very first film I directed was about that party.\u201d Indeed, Griffin would debut with his short film, 1995\u2019s Duke of Groove, which saw him nominated for an Academy Award, following a teenage boy, played by Tobey Maguire, who is taken to a party by his mother, played by Kate Capshaw, under the guise that she does not want to go alone. The son is convinced to go on the rumour that Joplin will be stopping by after her concert.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Later, Joplin\u2019s song \u2018Half Moon\u2019 would be chosen to soundtrack the trailer for Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a fitting parallel to the woman and night that inadvertently made Griffin a filmmaker.<\/p>\n

The unforgettable party, as it proved to be, was one that left Didion in disbelief, shifting her frame of thought regarding musicians in the process. Already sceptical of the optimism of the 1960s that she had perceived, the decline of rock culture into an unfortunate hedonism meant that the culture that surrounded her, in Los Angeles and beyond, was beginning to take a turn for the worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Kathleen Ballard \/ UCLA Library \/ Albert B. Grossman Management \u201cJanis Joplin is singing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":931814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[34220,77,122645,241450,556,269,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-931813","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-counterculture","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-janis-joplin","11":"tag-joan-didion","12":"tag-los-angeles","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116502226011240197","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/931814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}