The Police Told Janis Joplin’s Fans to Sit Down She Said I Ain’t Telling Them Shit and Kept Singing
November 16th, 1969. Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa, Florida. BB King had opened the show. The crowd of 3,500 people was warm and ready. Tickets had cost between 4 and $6. For many of the young people there, this was the most money they had spent on anything in months. For all of them, this was Janice Joplain. She took the stage.
She opened with summertime, slow and building, the voice settling into the room the way it always did, finding the dimensions of the space and filling them. The crowd moved forward. About 500 people pressed into the aisles to get closer. Others danced on top of their chairs. The room was doing what rooms did when Janice Joplain sang.
It stopped being a venue and started being a conversation between the voice and the people listening to it. Then the police moved in. The Curtis Hixon Hall manager had apparently told the Tampa police that the aisles needed to be clear. Fire code, safety, the ordinary logic of institutional authority trying to impose order on something that was not interested in order.
Officers began pushing people back, using their bodies, their hands, their presence to force the crowd from the aisles into their seats. The crowd resisted, not violently, just with the specific resistance of people who came to hear something and were being prevented from hearing it properly. Then detective LF Napoli raised a bullhorn and started shouting at the crowd through it midong while Janice Joplain was still performing.
She stopped. Not the band. The band kept playing, but she pulled the microphone close and she turned toward the officer with the bullhorn and she said into the microphone into the amplification of the entire hall to the 3,500 people who were there, “Don’t [ __ ] with those people.” The hall went quiet.
The officer stared at her. She stared back. He demanded she tell the crowd to return to their seats. She said, “I ain’t telling them shit.” There is a photograph of Janice Joplain that night. She is on the stage with the Bullhorn officer at the edge of the stage and she is pointing at him. Just pointing.
Her arm extended, her finger direct, her whole body aimed at him like an accusation. She also said at some point during the confrontation, “Hey, mister, why are you so uptight? Did you buy a $5 ticket?” The crowd, who had paid between four and $6 for their tickets, found this funny. Some of them were still laughing when the police escalated.
Sergeant Ed Williams, the officer in charge that evening, got a warrant for Janice Joplain’s arrest on charges of publicly using vulgar and indecent language. The specific language, that phrase she had said into the microphone. four words addressed to an officer who was shouting at her audience with a bullhorn while she was trying to sing.
She was allowed to finish her concert, seven songs total. When she walked off stage into her dressing room, the police were waiting. They arrested her handcuffed in the dressing room, still in the feather boa. She was 26 years old. Here is the context that makes this story more than a rock star behaving badly. In 1969, the relationship between concert audiences and law enforcement was not a neutral one.
The late 1960s had seen a shift in how police handled large gatherings of young people, particularly young people who looked like Janice Joplain’s audience. Long hair, unconventional dress, music that came from black artists, and had crossed into white counterculture. The people in the aisles at Curtis Hixon Hall were not a safety hazard.
They were people who wanted to dance closer to something that moved them. The police pressing them back to their seats with their bodies and then with a bullhorn were not protecting public safety. They were asserting authority over a room that had for the duration of Janice Joplain’s performance temporarily belonged to something else. She understood this.
She understood it the way someone who grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, understood authority as a system that decided who belonged where and enforced those decisions regardless of what the people affected thought. Port Arthur had told her she didn’t belong. San Francisco had told her she did. And now Tampa was telling her audience they didn’t belong in the aisles where they were dancing.
She had a microphone. She used it. Bail was set at $504. She paid it. She was released. The charges went to court. The judge ruled that her statements from the stage were protected free speech. The charges were dropped. In the legal record of Hillsboro County, Florida, Janice Joplain was vindicated. She had said something true.
The police had tried to silence her for saying it. The courts had determined she had the right. The four words she had said into the microphone, addressed to an officer who was using a bullhorn to shout at people who had paid to dance, were protected expression under the first amendment of the United States Constitution. She had known this before the judge said so.
She had said it anyway, knowing she might be arrested. She was arrested. She was right. There is something that needs to be said about the specific nature of what she did. She was mid-performance. She was in the middle of building something. The specific architecture of a Janice Joplain concert which took time and energy and required the full participation of both the performer and the crowd.
The aisles filling, the chairs being danced on, the crowd pressing forward. That was not a problem. That was the concert working correctly. She could have ignored the police. She could have kept singing and let them do what they were going to do. the show would have continued. The audience compressed back into their seats would have applauded at the end.
Nobody would have been arrested. Instead, she stopped. She turned. She pointed. She said what she said. She knew there would be consequences. There always were. When someone in a position of visibility used that visibility to say something to authority that authority didn’t want said. She had watched enough happen to enough people to understand the math.
She said it anyway because those people, the ones in the aisles, the ones dancing on their chairs, the ones who had paid their four to$6 to hear something that moved them and were now being told to sit still. Those people were hers, not hers in any possessive sense, hers in the sense that she had made a promise to them when she walked on stage.
The promise was for the duration of this I will give you everything I have and nobody is going to take that from you while I am standing here. A police officer with a bullhorn was trying to take it. She used her microphone. There is a version of this story that focuses on Janice Joplain’s arrest record. A rockar who used profanity and was arrested.
The mugsh shot. The court appearance. That version is accurate. It is also completely wrong about what actually happened. What actually happened was this. A woman on a stage saw people being mistreated by authority and used the only weapon she had, her voice amplified, to stand between them and that authority. She paid for it.
She was vindicated and she went home and kept touring. No interview the next day where she described herself as heroic. No publicist statement about her commitment to civil liberties. No strategic deployment of the arrest for image purposes. Just don’t [ __ ] with those people. And then the consequences and then continuing.
The people in those aisles at Curtis Hixon Hall on November 16th, 1969 are in their 70s now. Some of them remember, some of them have told the story to their children, to their grandchildren of the night they went to see Janice Joplain and the police tried to make them sit down and she stopped the show and said those words into the microphone and pointed at the officer.
The night someone used the biggest platform in the room to say, “Not tonight. Not to these people. Not while I’m standing here.” She didn’t know the cameras were rolling. She didn’t know the story would still be told 50 years later. She didn’t know the judge would rule in her favor or that the charges would be dropped or that the mug shot would eventually become one of the most circulated photographs of her later life.
She just knew that somebody had to say it and she was the one with the microphone. Here is what this story asks you. Have you ever been in a room where something wrong was happening and you had the ability to say something about it and you had to decide whether to speak? Janice Joplain was 26 years old. She was mid-performance. She was building the thing she was known for building, the specific communion between herself and her audience that made a Janice Joplain concert a Janice Joplain concert. She stopped. She pointed.
She spoke. She paid $504 in bail. She won in court. She kept touring. And somewhere in Tampa, Florida, 55 years later, there are people who were in those aisles that night who still remember the moment a woman on a stage looked at a police officer with a bullhorn and said the four words that got her arrested.
Don’t [ __ ] with those people. She meant every one of them. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
