Janis Joplin Was Planning a Vacation When Dick Cavett Interviewed Her — She Had Nine Days Left
The tape has been sitting in an archive for 50 years. Anyone can watch it right now. It is 22 minutes long. It contains a laugh, a sentence, and a silence. And it contains something that nobody in that studio understood at the time. Something that only became visible afterward when it was too late for it to matter.
This is the story of the last interview Janis Joplin ever gave and what was already in it before she knew it was there. September 18th, 1970. Sunset Sound Recording Studio, Los Angeles. Janis Joplin was recording Pearl. The sessions were going extraordinarily well. John Barlow Jarvis, the pianist, said later that she was more focused in those sessions than he had ever seen her.
Sharper, [snorts] more precise, more deliberate about what she wanted from every track. He said she knew what she was making. She knew it was the best thing she had ever done. Then someone came to the studio door. Jimi Hendrix was dead. He had died that morning in London. He was 27 years old. Bobby Womack, who was in contact with people close to Janis during those weeks, said she went quiet in the specific way she went quiet when something was too large for her usual vocabulary.
She left the studio. She did not go back that day. She had a television interview scheduled for the following week. To understand what Jimi Hendrix’s death meant to Janis Joplin, you have to understand what they were to each other. They were not close in the way of people who spend significant time together.
They were close in the way of people who recognized something in each other that almost nobody else in the world contains. Both of them had come from outside the system. Both of them used their instrument, his guitar, her voice, not as a tool for performing emotion, but as the thing the emotion actually was.
There was no gap between the feeling and the sound. The sound was the feeling. They had both arrived at Monterey in June 1967 and changed the same room on the same weekend. Jimmy on Saturday night, Janis on Sunday afternoon. Two performances that people who were present described in exactly the same terms. I did not know this was possible.
I have never seen anything like it. I will never forget this. They were both 27 years old in September of 1970. They were both in the middle of what looked from the outside like the most productive period of their respective careers. And now one of them was gone and the other one had a television interview scheduled for September 25th.
The Dick Cavett Show was the place where musicians and artists and writers went in 1970 to be taken seriously. Dick Cavett was not the kind of host who softened his questions to protect his guests. He was curious in the way that good interviewers are curious. Not performing interest, genuinely wanting to know what the person in the chair actually thought.
Janis had appeared on his show twice before. Their conversations had produced some of the most revealing footage of her that exists. She was sharper on camera than people expected. She was funnier, more precise. She had a way of answering questions that contained more honesty than the question had room for. And watching Cavett receive those answers was watching a host recalibrate in real time. September 25, 1970.
Nine days after Jimi Hendrix died. Nine days before Janis Joplin would die. She did not know the second number. Nobody did. She came out in her usual style. The feather boa, the beads, the oversized rings, the Southern Comfort. She was funny from the first moment. The audience responded to her immediately. The specific warmth of people who feel that someone has walked into the room and decided to actually be there.
She talked about Pearl. She talked about the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She talked about touring in San Francisco and what it felt like to make something you believed in completely. She was by every account of people who were in the studio that night fully present. All the way there. Giving everything. And then Dick Cavett asked about Jimmy.
He asked it carefully, not as an ambush, as a genuine question from someone who understood that the person sitting across from him had just lost a peer and wanted to know what that meant to her. Janis was quiet for a moment. The studio audience, which had been laughing and responsive throughout, went still.
She looked at her hands briefly. And then she looked up at Cavett and she said, “The thing is, we all might not outlive our own fame.” Cavett let that sit. Then she said, “Jimmy was burning so hard that something had to give eventually.” She paused again. Then she said very quietly, almost to herself, “I wonder if it’s possible to burn that hard and not burn out.” Read that sentence again.
“I wonder if it’s possible to burn that hard and not burn out.” She was talking about Jimi Hendrix. She was also, in the way that people sometimes speak about themselves through the vehicle of someone else, talking about herself. She had been burning at exactly that intensity since 1967. Three years of performances that left audiences describing the same things in the same words from coast to coast.
The giving of everything, the holding of nothing back, the specific quality of a person who has decided that the distance between what they feel and what they show is a distance not worth maintaining. Three years of that and sitting across from Dick Cavett on September 25th, 1970, she looked at what had happened to Jimmy and she asked the question out loud.
The question she had perhaps been asking herself for a while, not rhetorically, genuinely. The way you ask a question when you actually want to know the answer and are not sure you are going to like it. Dick Cavett held the silence for a beat longer than television usually allows. He said later in interviews about that night, he understood that something important had just happened in that room.
He did not know what. He held it because he had been doing this long enough to know when something needed to be held. Then he moved the conversation forward. The way you do. She brightened immediately when he asked what came next. She talked about plans, a vacation she wanted to take, a place she wanted to go, things she wanted to do that had nothing to do with recording or performing.
She talked about wanting to slow down just for a while, just long enough to remember what it felt like to move through the world at normal speed. And that is the part that stays with you. She was planning a vacation. She had nine days. She flew back to Los Angeles after the taping. She went back to Sunset Sound.
She went back to Pearl. The band remembered her as focused and professional and fully present in those final sessions. The most organized she had ever been in a studio, they said. She was keeping the work and the rest of her life separate in a way she had not always managed before. On October 1st, she recorded Me and Bobby McGee. One take.
Because one take was what she needed. On the evening of October 3rd, she went out with members of the band and road crew. She came back to the Landmark Motor Hotel late. On October 4th. John Cook, her road manager, the man who had been with her since 1967, came to find her when she did not appear for a scheduled session.
She was 27 years old. She had been gone for some hours. The Dick Cavett Show interview aired on October 5, 1970. One day after Janis Joplin died, millions of people watched it, not knowing she was already gone. Some of them found out during the broadcast. Some found out after. All of them had the same experience, watching a woman who did not know what was coming describe her plans for a future she was not going to have.
They watched her laugh. They watched her be funny and sharp and alive in all the ways she was always alive. And there, underneath the laughter, the question she had asked about Jimmy, “I wonder if it’s possible to burn that hard and not burn out?” She had answered her own question. Not in words.
In the nine days between the taping and October 4th, the answer was no. For Jimmy, the answer was no. For Janis, the answer was no. For the people who burn at that specific intensity, who give everything every time, who hold nothing in reserve, who decide that the distance between what they feel and what they show is a distance not worth maintaining, for those people, the candle does not last as long.
But the light it puts out, that is a different question entirely. The tape has been sitting in an archive for 50 years. Anyone can watch it right now. It contains a laugh, a sentence, and a silence. It contains a woman who was nine days from the end asking out loud whether people like her and Jimmy could survive the specific way they lived.
She was asking for both of them. She did not know the answer yet. Nine days later, she found it. And the tape, which anyone can watch right now contains everything that was about to happen already there, already visible if you know where to look. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
