The Invention of Pearl

Eight of this book's twenty-one chapters end before Monterey, and the proportion is the argument. The received account holds that Pearl was a costume the counterculture fitted over a true self, and that it killed the woman underneath. The order of events says otherwise. She built it herself, in Port Arthur and Austin, between roughly 1958 and 1963, out of the only materials available to a clever, overweight, sexually unrespectable girl in a Gulf Coast refinery town: Bessie Smith and Odetta records ordered in by mail, a Beat vocabulary out of paperbacks bought the same way, and a decision at about sixteen that if she was going to be disliked she would be disliked on purpose, at volume, first. She ran it four years before anybody paid. At the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 the record business watched it, priced it, and placed a standing order it never let her cancel — on a second take, the Saturday set having gone unfilmed and been redone for the cameras on Sunday.

The voice is the second claim. In 1962, in Austin, she cut a blues of her own onto a home recorder, and that voice is clean, placed, in tune, without grain. Four years later she stood on a ballroom stage with two overdriven guitars behind her and nothing aimed back at her, the only person up there who could not hear herself. She solved it by driving the voice past the pressure at which it closes cleanly and letting the tone break on purpose. Audiences took the breakage for sincerity. Same larynx, different acoustic problem.

It is not a tribute; the received Janis needs a wound in the first chapter, and that household does not supply one. It is not a prosecution either. The hour the life becomes legible through is a class reunion in Port Arthur on the fourteenth of August, 1970, where the persona met the exact audience it had been engineered at sixteen to defeat, and worked perfectly, and was worth nothing. She had fifty-one days left.