She Wrote a Song About Wanting a Mercedes She Already Owned a PORSCHE with captions
She wrote a song begging God for a MercedesBenz because her friends all drove Porsches. The song became a classic. Nobody mentioned that when she recorded it, she already owned a Porsche. And what she had done to that car is the reason it sold for $1.76 million 45 years after she died. This is the story of a $3,500 used car that became the most famous automobile in the history of rock and roll.
Janice Joplain arrived in San Francisco in 1966 with almost nothing. She had left Port Arthur, Texas behind, the town that had bullied her, the classmates who had voted her the ugliest man on campus as a joke. She had left all of that behind and driven west with everything she owned. And San Francisco in 1966 was exactly the right place to be.
Nobody from nowhere because everyone there was trying to become someone new. She joined a band called Big Brother in the Holding Company. She played small clubs. She slept in cheap apartments. She scraped together enough money for a used British compact called a Sunbeam. And she played and played and played until the night at the Mterrey Pop Festival in 1967.
When she walked onto that stage in front of the cameras and the press and opened her mouth and everything changed. Within a year, she was one of the most famous women in America. The money started coming in and the first thing she did with the money was something very specific. She went to a used car lot in Beverly Hills in September of 1968 and she bought a 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet.
$3,500. She paid cash. The car was painted oyster white, factory finish, sensible and plain. And Janice drove it home and looked at it and understood immediately that something was wrong because oyster white was not the right color for Janice Joplain. Oyster white was the color of a car that belonged to someone who was trying not to be noticed, and Janice had spent her entire childhood being punished for being noticed.
And then she had spent the rest of her life deciding that she was going to be seen no matter what. So she called her Roie. His name was Dave Richards. He had been working with Big Brother as equipment manager. But Richards had another skill. He could paint. And Janice handed him $500 and the keys to a Porsche and told him to do whatever he wanted.
Richards called what he made the history of the universe. He started with a base coat of candy apple red. And then he covered the entire car, every panel, every curve, every surface, with a world that existed only in his imagination and hers. On the hood, he painted the eye of God. On the right door, he painted the Marin County landscape, the hills and the water, and the light of the place where Janice lived.
On another panel, he painted portraits of Big Brother and the Holding Company. He painted Janice’s astrological sign, Capricorn. He painted skulls and mushrooms and butterflies and flowers. And somewhere he painted the cosmos itself, stars and nebuli and the darkness between them. And under the gas flap, where nobody would notice unless they looked, he painted a man’s face being sick.
Because even the hidden corners of the car had a story. And when he was finished, he covered the entire thing in a layer of clear coat to protect what was underneath. And Janice drove it out of the driveway and onto the streets of San Francisco. and the city stopped and stared. By the end of 1968, it was the most recognizable car in San Francisco, possibly in the state of California.
Fans who saw it parked on the street would leave notes under the windshield wipers. Her boyfriend David Knee House remembered that in 1970 he would park the car and come back to find 150 people gathered around it just looking at it, just standing there in the street looking at the history of the universe as if the answer to something might be painted on a door panel.
The car became inseparable from Janice, not because she designed it, not because she put a single brushstroke on it, but because it was made out of the same impulse that made her music, the impulse that said, “I will not be invisible. I will not pretend to be something small and quiet and acceptable.
I am going to be exactly what I am, and if that makes you uncomfortable, then look away.” But she knew you would not look away. Nobody looked away from Janice. And nobody looked away from the Porsche. She drove it everywhere she could, to concerts in San Francisco, to the grocery store, to friends houses up in the hills.
She drove it the way she sang, which was without apology and without holding anything back. And then someone stole it. It happened in 1969 outside the Winterland Ballroom after a show. She came out to the street and it was gone. The thief took the most recognizable car in California and immediately understood the problem. Because you cannot hide a car that looks like that.
You cannot park it on any street in any city without every person within a block radius turning to look. So the thief did the only thing that made any sense. He started spray painting over the mural, trying to cover the history of the universe with a coat of gray primer. But he did not finish. The police found the car before he could finish, and they brought it back to Janice, and Janice brought it back to Dave Richards.
And Richards looked at the gray primer sitting on top of the clear coat and understood what the clear coat had been there to do all along. He peeled the gray primer away, and underneath it, the eye of God was still there. The Marin County Hills were still there. The skulls and the mushrooms and the cosmos were still there untouched because Richards had known that something worth making was worth protecting and the Porsche went back on the road.
There is something that needs to be said here about the song because the song came later. Janice recorded MercedesBenz on October 1st, 1970, 3 days before she died. She recorded it ac capella in the studio. No instruments, just her voice. A prayer to God asking for a MercedesBenz. Because my friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
The song was a joke, a satire of materialism, of the idea that the right car or the right color television could fix whatever was broken inside you. and it is funny and it is perfectly constructed. And the irony that she already owned a Porsche when she recorded it, that she had driven a Porsche for 2 years, a Porsche that looked unlike any other vehicle on earth, never made it into most of the stories told about her.
But it should, because it tells you exactly who she was. She was not the woman who wanted a MercedesBenz. She was the woman who bought a Porsche and turned it into the history of the universe. She was the woman who took something plain and oyster white and ordinary and made it into something you could not look away from.
That is the joke and the truth at the same time. And three days after she recorded the song on October 4th, 1970, Janice Joplain died in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood. She was 27 years old. She had been alone. The Porsche was in a parking lot nearby. After she died, the car went to her manager, Albert Gman.
He kept it in Bearsville, New York, and musicians who came to visit would borrow it. They would drive it around upstate New York, the most recognizable car in California, sitting in the woods of New York. Because nobody knew what else to do with it, eventually it went back to Janice’s family, to her brother Michael and her sister Laura, and Michael drove it and watched the paint start to fail.
The history of the universe was flaking off in the upstate winters. big chips of paint flying off on the highway. And Michael made a decision that he would later regret and then unregret. He had the paint removed. All of it. The eye of God, the Marin County Hills, the skulls and the mushrooms and the cosmos. All of it gone because the car was falling apart and they needed to save it.
And for a while there was a version of the world where Janice Droplain’s Porsche was just a Porsche, an old Porsche sitting in a family’s garage going slowly gray. But then the family made a play, a theatrical production called Love Janice. And when they brought the Porsche out for the production, they understood what they had taken away.
And they commissioned two artists named Jana Mitchell and Amber Owen. And they gave them stacks and stacks of photographs, every photograph anyone had ever taken of the car from every angle. And they asked them to put the history of the universe back where it belonged. And Mitchell and Owen did brush stroke by brush stroke, panel by panel, working from the photographs the way a restorer works from X-rays of a painting.
finding what was underneath what was visible, reconstructing something that had been lost. And when they were finished, the eye of God was back on the hood. The Marin County Hills were back on the right door. The skulls and the mushrooms and the cosmos were back where Richards had put them. And the Porsche went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where it stayed for 20 years, parked in a glass case.
The most famous automobile in the history of rock and roll, sitting still for the first time, being looked at, being preserved, being kept. And then in December of 2015, the Joplain family made one more decision. They decided to sell it. Laura Joplain explained why. She said the family had come to understand that Janice’s potential audience was far beyond the number of people who could see the car in person.
She said they wanted to use the money to extend Janice’s legacy in ways that could reach more people. The estimate was between $400,000 and $600,000. A significant sum for any used car. even one with a story. On December 10th, 2015 at RM Southerne’s Driven by Disruption auction in New York City, the bidding opened and did not stop where anyone expected.
The final price was $1,760,000, setting a record for any Porsche 356 ever sold at public auction. Ian Keller from Sibies said afterward that he had never been involved with a celebrity car quite like it. He said that people identified with Janice Joplain’s car because she drove it often, because she was photographed in it constantly, because it was not a possession separate from who she was.
It was an extension of who she was. He said he could not think of a better car that defined that idea. And he was right. Because the Porsche is not valuable because it belonged to a famous person. Elvis Presley had dozens of cars. Frank Sinatra had Jaguars and Rolls-Royces. Valuable cars, all of them, but not cars that looked like their owner from the outside.
Not cars that told you everything you needed to know about a person before you ever heard them speak. The Porsche is valuable because it is a portrait. It is what Dave Richards made with $500 and a set of brushes. A portrait of a woman who refused to be oyster white, who refused to be invisible, who took the most conservative thing about herself, a German sports car in a sensible factory finish, and turned it into the history of the universe, and then drove it down the street with the top down, and did not care who stared.
Janice Joplain died at 27. She recorded 52 songs in her career. She performed in cities across America and Europe and Canada. She changed the way people understood what a voice could do, what a woman on a stage was allowed to do. and she owned one car that she truly loved, a used Porsche that she bought for $3,500 and gave to a man with $500 and a set of brushes and told him to do whatever he wanted.
He painted the eye of God on the hood, and everything else followed from that. The car is somewhere in private hands now. Whoever bought it at the Sbees auction in 2015 has not said publicly where it is or what they have done with it or whether they drive it or whether they keep it still in a room somewhere.
Looking at the history of the universe painted on the door of a used Porsche by a roadie who was paid $500 to make something that a billionaire would pay 1.76 million for 45 years later. The eye of God is still on the hood. Wherever the car is, the eye of God is looking at something. What do you think she would have thought about that number? $1.
76 million for the car she bought for $3500. Tell us in the comments and subscribe because we find these stories every week. And this one, as you can see, does not end where you expect it
