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Fact #91959

When:

Short story:

Aspiring rock singer Janis Joplin hitch-hikes from Port Arthur, Texas, USA, to San Francisco with her friend Chet Helms.

Full article:

Janis Joplin : He needed a girl to get rides, and I needed a guy so I wouldn't get raped.

I was a pretty normal person until I was fifteen or sixteen, then I got weird. Everybody thought I was a beatnik. Port Arthur didn't take too kindly to beatniks. I read, I painted, I thought, I didn't hate 'niggers' … there wasn't anybody like me in Port Arthur. Until I was seventeen, I thought I was the only person like that in the world. It was lonely, all those feelings welling up and no one to talk to. I was just 'silly crazy Janis.' Man, those people hurt me. It makes me happy to know that I'm making it and that they're back there, plumbers just like they were.

Tary Owens (friend of Joplin): Janis and I grew up in Port Arthur and we were really good friends. Jim Langdon also wrote some articles about Janis in an attempt to get her singing career going again. Janis had been singing in California and she had a bout with drug addiction. She came back to Texas to get straightened out and after she did she wanted to sing again. Jim Langdon arranged for her to come back to Austin and play at a place called The 11th Door doing bluesy-folk stuff. It was a benefit show for Teodar Jackson who had been killed.

 A number of musicians performed, such as myself and Powell St. John, but of particular interest was that Janis sang and The (Thirteenth Floor) Elevators closed the show. Roger Baker did a light show which was done at the Methodist Student Center. It was the first light show in Austin which was during June 1966 and it may have been the first light show in the country, possibly before anything in California.

 Janis met The Elevators and there was talk of Janis joining the band, but she got an offer to go back to California and join Big Brother And The Holding Company. So she took that instead of staying with The Elevators.
(Source : not known)