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

While I do think that this shouldn’t be someone’s first read on Joplin (I’d pick a different biography for your introduction to Janis & her life) as it’s a bit heavy, this is an excellent book. Scars of Sweet Paradise is a deep, well researched & detailed look into not only Joplin’s life, but also the times & context in which she rose to stardom. A great read for music nerds like myself. For Joplin fans looking for a good look into her life and career, I would issue a warning: This book is very heavy on the “times of Janis Joplin” aka (60’s and the culture) and lighter on the “life of Janis Joplin” for most of the book...

I bought this book because I discovered that Janis Joplin had recorded many more records/songs than I knew, when I opened an archive with her songs. Wow! An overload!I mean, there was a past in her recorded musical life history that I didn't know and I thought I would like to make a life time-line of these big number of songs, because I was suddenly overloaded with many more musical work than I thought Janis had done.I searched through the reviews and choose this book. Maybe it could help me. It was a good choice. Maybe the best!I had those songs at the end of the book, one by one, detailed. I understand that it might be boring to place each song she recorded as the author told us about her life. On the other side, there should be more contextualization of the songs she recorded.I would give this book five stars if their recording, their singing!, appeared through the narrative. I can't forgive this. "Whyyy?" I don't mean the studio, the sound engeneers, etc. I mean Janis singing and recording, just that. Not all the songs, of course. But the phase in her development as an artist that some of them represented. Just a few lines. Why not? This creates a division that is not real, it's not true to her life, the first task of a biographer. At the end of the book, maybe the reader will have a surprise similar to the one I had... "Wow, all these songs... I had never heard about them..."Another topic, now. I don't care too much about bios of the musicians I really like. This is the first Janis bio I read, although I have one since the end of the 70s. For instance, later, I saw a Janis bio with many pictures of her with girlfriends, mostly one girlfriend, if I remember well. I was surprised and I looked at some of the pictures and left the book on the shelf.But this is a subject that may interest many people, including me. I liked the way the author dealed with this topic. She didn't write as a prude, a sensationalist or some kind of academic preaching intellectual... She tried to understand what love meant to Janis while she was building her career, and the career came first. The stage was the best place in the world for Janis. The contact with the audience. The success with the people while she was singing. She was always on the run, after the Monterey festival, and the stage and career came first. At the end of the show, and the party after it, she might be the loniest person in town, without a boyfriend, without a girlfriend, but she had a musical career to keep and a stair to climb higher.And, talking about loving a single person, what about genre, who came first, man or woman? Janis had a dream (it seems that she always told it to her girlfriends...) of a good man, children and a house with a white fence around it. But her relations with men... well, read the book, it is good, it tries to tell the truth about women and men in Janis love life and this is a good point in this book. It's a pity that it has no pictures, but it's easy to understand, those pictures are worth much money...So, in this book, you have a good 'picture' of Janis as a person and Janis as an artist. Concerning Janis as an artist, the author tells us about Janis way of creating a different musical persona, a musical (and visual, a little after) image that would open the doors to her, and I think the book makes another good point here, and this is important to understand a little more about Janis as an artist. For those who care more about this side of Janis, there's important information here, too. The author's opinion about Janis influence on singers that came after her may surprise you, so I will not talk about it. I liked it, I had felt it too. Are we right?The book has a nice style, you'll read it with pleasure and you'll learn a lot about Janis. Janis in Texas, San Francisco, hipsters, hippies, drugs, sex and music. There are many funny passages, a very balanced approach. It is not a book that you will certainly read only one time and never read again. I'll go back to it, as I go on listening and learning all those songs I have been missing.I just wish the life line and the recording line were more interlaced.That has cost you a star, Alice Echols.

You will enjoy this even if you love Janis or hate her. I love her music, and Echols paints her as a real human being, sometimes brutal, sometimes vulnerable, always fascinating. An excellent biographical work that humanizes the legend. Janis is not portrayed as a victim, an abused woman or an abuser. Echols emphasizes the confusion of all of us who lived in those times. Some of us learned to tell -- or read -- about them. Unfortunately, Janis did not. Echols helps us to find a real person with a talent that is still, in this reader's opinion, unsurpassed.

I had already read Buried Alive, which I thought was great! But I really like this book because it gives a much greater look at Janis's life at home, school, college, and her friends. It also covers the culture of those times both in and out of Beaumont, TX. Haven't finished reading it yet but it's a great read!

I read the reviews and bought this particular biography for exactly the reason most readers did t like it, lots of info about what was happening at the time. I was very young in the sixties and my experience is colored by my youth. It is great to get a different perspective( an adult perspective) I am really enjoying the book, though not do big a fan when the author guesses how Janis was feeling- though even that gives some insight into other perspectives.

An in depth study of Janis Joplin's life put in context of the stories told by friends and family and the developing counterculture of the sixties.Also a very good read for anybody wanting to know about Janis and the sixties. Above all Janis had a magnificent vocal ability, honed from years of performing and listening to the early folk, country and blues singers. She worked a creating her own highly expressive vocal style, like Hendrix with his guitar.

Read this book for my gender studies - sex in the 60's course. It was the most enjoyable school reading I've done in a long time. I have recommended this book highly to my friends and family!

Janisは病んだアメリカの一局面を生き、そして殺された。BLMに通ずる。

Janis Joplin has always intrigued me because of all the references made to her even after her death as a rock and roll icon and because she died in the year I was born -1970.I certainly was not disappointed when I read about her life story in Alice Echols biography,'Scars of Sweet Paradise, The Life and Times of Janis Joplin.'What an excellent book!The author approaches Joplin's life story with candour and empathy as she charts the life of the girl from Port Arthur,Texas whose feeling of being an outsider in small-town Texas would develop into her uniqueness and fascinating individuality as one of the female musical icons of the sixties.Alice Echols' biography is well written and also highly informative of the sixties, the sixties counter-culture: hippies, drugs, physchedelics,The West Coast of the US with San Francisco becoming the mecca of the beat -nik culture. She also describes clearly and vividly the emotional turbulence of Joplin's life that would eventually overwhelm her and destroy her life and musical career.What I found interesting about this book is how Joplin's rise and fall takes place against the background of an America that was rapidly changing, the civil rights movement, the impending war in Vietnam, the women's rights movement all run parallel to her own struggles of being a woman in a male dominated rock and roll world. A wonderful and talented woman, a tortured soul and what a shame that the world lost a legend too soon. I would recommend this book to anyone who was keen on reading a great music biography. Janis rocks!

It gave me a much needed insight.