Janis Joplin was the skyrocket chick of the sixties, the woman who broke into the boys club of rock and out of the stifling good-girl femininity of postwar America. With her incredible wall-of-sound vocals, Joplin was the voice of a generation, and when she ODd on heroin in October 1970, a generations dreams crashed and burned with her. Alice Echols pushes past the legary Joplin-the red-hot mama of her own invention-as well as the familiar portrait of the screwed-up star victimized by the era she symbolized, to examine the roots of Joplins muscianship and explore a generations experiment with high-risk living and the terrible price it exacted.
