Skip to main content

Hear a Rare First Recording of Janis Joplin’s Hit “Me and Bobby McGee,” Written by Kris Kristofferson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irU5oihACj4

“You can’t think of that song without thinking of Janis,” says Kris Kristofferson of Janis Joplin’s raw, bittersweet, posthumous “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson, who wrote the song, only heard Joplin’s version after her death, when he returned to California after playing the Isle of Wight in 1970. He met the producer of Joplin’s last album, Pearl, in L.A., who told him to come to the studio “to play me her recording of ‘Bobby McGee.’ And it just blew me away. Just blew me away.” Above, you can hear a rare recording, possibly the first take, and possibly one of the early versions Kristofferson heard in the studio.

Many people have assumed Kristofferson wrote the song for Joplin, but that’s not the case: he didn’t know she was recording it at all. It was written, in 1969, about a woman, Barbara “Bobby” McKee, who worked as a secretary in songwriter Fred Foster’s building. Foster gave Kristofferson the title “Me and Bobby McKee,” Kristofferson misheard the last name, assumed it was a man, and wrote the famous lyrics, inspired not by Barbara but by Federico Fellini’s La Strada, in which Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina travel together on a motorcycle as a performing duo. (The Louisiana references come in because Kristofferson was working as a helicopter pilot in the Gulf at the time.)

In La Strada, Quinn “got to the point where he couldn’t put up with [Masina] anymore and left her by the side of the road while she was sleeping,” says Kristofferson. Later, when he finds out she has died, he “goes to a bar and gets in a fight. He’s drunk and ends up howling at the stars on the beach.” In a parallel to this mournful scene, Tom Breihan at Stereogum describes how Kristofferson, after hearing Joplin’s version of the song, “spent the rest of the day walking around Los Angeles, crying. He probably wasn’t alone. A lot of people probably cried when they heard Joplin singing ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’” A lot of people still do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahpIirW0svY

A long list of famous singers has covered the song, originally recorded by Roger Miller—just about anyone you might name in folk and country. But Joplin “made it her own,” Kristofferson says, and it’s no empty cliché. Written as a country song, Joplin doesn’t quite sing it that way, and she “doesn’t really sing it as blues or psychedelic rock either,” writes Breihan. “Instead, she just lets it rip, her phrasing immediate and instinctive,” howling at the stars like Anthony Quinn. “Joplin might’ve never hitchhiked across the country with anyone named Bobby McGee,” but she “did what great interpreters do.” She made the song “about Janis Joplin, because that’s what Janis Joplin made it.”

Related Content:

Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Interview Get Reborn as an Animated Cartoon

Janis Joplin’s Last TV Performance & Interview: The Dick Cavett Show (1970)

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlikely Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Hear a Rare First Recording of Janis Joplin’s Hit “Me and Bobby McGee,” Written by Kris Kristofferson is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/36mVDr4
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more