
And by 1971, the year of NPR's story, The Doors had played some of the biggest gigs, like the Hollywood Bowl and The Ed Sullivan Show. When Morrison performed, he and the band packed auditoriums with their theatrical screams and pulsating electronic music. Listeners were also entranced by the band's unmistakably dark sound. Morrison often wrote about alienation, drawing millions of fans, including generations of high school kids who could relate. The title track is one of the great rock songs of that period: "Driving down your freeways / Midnight alleys roam / Cops in cars, the topless bars / Never saw a woman / So alone, so alone," Morrison sings on the rock classic, a vignette about people at the margins of society. 10 Sec EXCLUSIVE Interview With Iam Tongi Winner Of American Idol 2023 As swiftly as Joplin rose to stardom, she soon left it all behind when she died at the age of 27 on Oct. Woman, an album so memorable it still lives and breathes, half a century later. Morrison's death was a cultural milestone of NPR's first year. It was the first year of NPR and Mike Walters, an early host of All Things Considered, worked his way up to that news by reciting a few relevant lyrics from "An American Prayer," a song written by Morrison: "We live, we die, and death not ends it / Journey we more into the nightmare / Cling to life our passioned flower." 1, 2021.įifty years ago, on July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison - lead singer of the rock group The Doors - died in Paris. He never had a problem letting other people shine.The members of The Doors, from left to right: Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek (seated). He was an amazing musician, a wonderfully openhearted player. Joplin was for shopping for clothes and hanging out and laughing, and Jimi was for playing. We were both outsiders, and she was very protective of me in a really nice way. We both felt like nothing we wore looked right. I think we fell in together because we had things in common. You were friends with some of the biggest stars of the era. And it was scary because there were all these people screaming at me at concerts and people spitting at me on the street. That's an amazing moment, the first time you hear yourself on radio. Somebody had a transistor radio, and they walked in with it. I remember going into the supermarket, a Gristedes on 86th Street and Broadway, and it was playing in the background on the street. Suddenly there I was in the middle of it.īoth. I would hear Pete Seeger the power of music to frighten people and to change people. Then everybody started all this hate mail. Peggy Caserta has insisted that Joplins death was not an accidental overdose, but rather a result of a head gash suffered after the hourglass heel of her. I thought the rest of the country would be, too. For me, it was just exciting because all of these stations in New York. My dad had said I was going to have problems over the song, but I really didn't think that I would. There was a lot of controversy surrounding Society's Child. And some guy literally ran backstage yelling, Kid, I'm going to make you a star. Davis told him that Gary wasn't feeling well and they had to cancel.

I was friends with Gary Davis and his wife, and they took me down to the Gaslight Café and tried to convince the owner, Clarence Hood, to let me open for Gary. We moved to New York three or four months later and I started banging on doors. I finished it sitting outside my guidance counselor's office. I saw a black and white couple sitting there and started thinking about it. I started Society's Child on a bus in East Orange as I was going home from school. How did your song Society's Child come about? My mom always said it was obvious that nothing was going to stop me. Whatever the cause, it is clear that Joplin’s untimely passing was a devastating loss to the music world and to her legion of devoted fans. We were living in East Orange, and I made friends with a bunch of student nurses, and I'd go over to their dormitory and play for them. Some reports suggest that she died from a heroin overdose, while others point to complications from alcohol abuse and a combination of drugs. I played for anybody and everybody from the time I started playing guitar, when I was 10 or 11.

TIME reached Ian at her home in Nashville: Ian, 57, recounts this and more in her new memoir, Society's Child (Tarcher/Penguin).

She attempted suicide, went broke, survived an abusive marriage, wrote and performed another megahit, At Seventeen, and became a lesbian activist. While she was fortunate not to meet their fates both died of drug overdoses Ian had her own tumultuous life. Ian soon became pals with some of the era's greatest musical stars, including Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It raced up the charts and caused an immediate firestorm. In 1966, at the age of 15, she recorded Society's Child, a song she'd written about an interracial romance. Follow Ian's initiation into rock 'n' roll was early and dramatic.
