Janis Joplin

American singer and rock-star of the hippie years whose style of singing was a cross between blues and larynx-shredding, carefully rehearsed shrieking. Her rise to fame was fast, burning with drugs and alcohol, a workaholic whose friends warned her to slow down. Her band-mate, Sam Andrew of the "Big Brother and the Holding Co." claims she never did grass or acid; Joplin's drug-of-choice was heroin to keep herself going on her self-imposed rigid schedule. She was one of the first women to break into the exclusive boys' club of rock'n'roll, rising from a pimply wallflower to a beloved emblem of hippie rebellion.

Her friends called her Pearl. An overweight, unhappy kid, she expressed her resentment and hunger in heavy-duty parties and indiscriminate sex with both men and women, generally living on what she called "the outer limits of probability" until her death at 27 of a heroin/morphine overdose in a Hollywood motel room, on 4 October 1970 at 1:40 AM. Her fiancé, Seth Morgan believes that she would of broadened her horizons in a slower more natural growth cycle if she would lived. Her sister Laura has written an off-beat, often funny biography called "Love, Janis."