Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin - Softcover

9780805053944: Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
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Janis Joplin was the skyrocket chick of the sixties, the woman who broke into the boys' club of rock and out of the stifling good-girl femininity of postwar America. With her incredible wall-of-sound vocals, Joplin was the voice of a generation, and when she OD'd on heroin in October 1970, a generation's dreams crashed and burned with her. Alice Echols pushes past the legary Joplin-the red-hot mama of her own invention-as well as the familiar portrait of the screwed-up star victimized by the era she symbolized, to examine the roots of Joplin's muscianship and explore a generation's experiment with high-risk living and the terrible price it exacted.

A deeply affecting biography of one of America's most brilliant and tormented stars, Scars of Sweet Paradise is also a vivid and incisive cultural history of an era that changed the world for us all.

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Review:
To call Janis Joplin the Judy Garland of the Woodstock set is in some sense a fair characterization. The brassy, carnal, extravagant, and ultimately pitiable queen of psychedelic rock is indeed a cultural icon. And while Joplin reveled in her own ballsy, boozy legend, its needy, inebriated, real-life equivalent was a shadow that darkened her short life and, in the decades since her 1970 drug-induced death, has come to eclipse the party-girl persona.

To her great credit, author Alice Echols reconciles the two faces of Joplin in this ambitious, thoroughly readable biography. She does so by tracing Joplin from her youth as a natural-born libertine in dreary Port Arthur, Texas, to her emergence as the sole female rock superstar of her era--a period when beneath-the-surface sexism hampered Joplin's progress even while women's liberation was being widely touted. The author does not shy away from sordid sex-and-drugs episodes, and there's plenty of raw material---the singer was promiscuous, bisexual, and, at various times, an alcoholic, a speed freak, and a junkie. Echols, however, elevates this biography above run-of-the-mill rock profiles by painting her subject against an elaborate and ever-changing cultural backdrop. Here is Joplin the aspiring folksinger, the white-picket-fence wannabe, the wayward daughter, the hit-and-miss recording artist, and, finally, the ill-starred spirit with nothing left to lose. --Steven Stolder

About the Author:

Alice Echols is a historian and cultural critic. She has taught at UCLA, USC, and Occidental College and has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, and L.A. Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles.

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  • PublisherHenry Holt and Company
  • Publication date2000
  • ISBN 10 0805053948
  • ISBN 13 9780805053944
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages464
  • Rating

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9781860497292: Scars of Sweet Paradise : The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781860497292
Publisher: Virago Press Ltd, 2001
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  • 9780805053876: Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

    Metrop..., 1999
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