Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin.

Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin * Alice Echols * Metropolitan Books * $26

Janis Joplin has now been dead a little longer than she lived, but nearly 29 years after she OD'd on heroin at the Landmark Motel in Los Angeles (three months before her 28th birthday), she remains vivid to those who saw her mesmerizing stage performances or heard her gut-wrenching vocals on vinyl. If 1960s survivors still mourn her loss, it's because few--if any--white women singers have wrestled with the blues and rock and roll quite as emotionally or dynamically since.

Maybe that's why Alice Echols's fine new biography doesn't seem old hat. Even though there have been several Joplin bios of varying styles and quality over the years, her life story still seems open for appraisal. Echols's work is the most sober take yet on the life of the boozy protagonist. A feminist historian who writes about rock music, Echols carefully constructs a portrait of a very human if iconic woman, placing her precisely within the larger tapestry of an extraordinary era.

Echols doesn't get to Janis's short but mighty three-year recording career until halfway through the book, but Joplin's rebellious growing-up and early musical adventures in the oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Tex., merit the attention. The acne and awkwardness of early adolescence hit the sensitive, intelligent young Texan like a freight train, but she fended off rejection with an "I'll just be more outrageous" fury.

After making several attempts at secretarial classes to please her mother, Joplin ended up in San Francisco at the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene, where sex, drugs, and rock and roll proved a temporary filler for a pit of impossibly deep insecurity. Along the way to stardom, first with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin consumed enough speed, Southern Comfort, and heroin to seal her reputation (and, eventually, her fate) and approached sex with the same all-you-can-eat enthusiasm.

We know that Janis slept with women as well as men thanks to Going Down With Janis (Lyle Stuart Inc., 1973), the deliciously trashy tell-all from girlfriend Peggy Caserta (with collaborator Dan Knapp). Its opening line--which Caserta tells Echols she didn't write and is still trying to live down--remains one of the most memorable in pulp lit: "1 was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin, and the girl lying between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin."

Echols paints a more three-dimensional Janis, citing such earlier lady loves as Julie Paul, a "very butch" young woman who "took care of Janis and treated her like a boy would treat her," and Jae Whitaker, an African-American amateur musician who recalls, "I was too settled for Janis, even then."

Echols places Joplin's bisexuality in the context of both her repressive '50s upbringing and the pre-gay lib times, reporting that Joplin would brag loudly about her male conquests while keeping her female intimacies quiet among all but certain close friends. Nonetheless, Joplin remains a lesbian heroine simply because of the unapologetic way she slashed and burned through her brief, talented life. As Echols writes, "When Janis sang you could hear her awe and delight at breaking all the rules.... She wasn't always happy, but she went for broke and changed the rules for all of us."

Kort is writing a biography of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro for St. Martin's Press.