Here’s today’s question. Why did Janis Joplin sing, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends”, when her daily driver was a psychedelically painted 1964 Porsche 356SC cabriolet?
Well, friends and others, if you want to know you have to be prepared for a weird journey into the 1960s and 70s, a time of which our spiritual guide Raoul Duke said: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
Janis was bored. There was a problem with the tape machine and work on the album she was recording had stopped.
Janis was in the glass booth at the former repair shop turned sound studio on 6650 Sunset Boulevard. She walked up to the microphone in bare feet. She didn’t want her Canadian band Full Tilt Boogie to make a noise and for laughs sang the a cappella based on beat poet Michael McClure’s Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes-Benz. Michael drives a Honda.
It was the last song she recorded.
Two years earlier she had bought a second-hand very white Porsche for $3500. In those days no self-respecting rock goddess could have bland. So she gave road manager Dave Roberts $500 to paint the porker.
Dave was a carpenter, sculptor and self-taught tattoo artiste. His work was influenced by cult cartoonist Robert Crumb. Bob had left San Francisco when his dear wife had tried to send him to a better place by dropping 30 sleeping tablets in his soup. Ah, those were the days.
Dave spent 30 days (see the eerie connection here: 30 days … 30 tablets) painting butterflies, meandering meadows, the eye of god, Capricorn (Janis’s star sign) and other colourful things that could have come to him only while examining the inner recesses of his mind to create what he called, modestly, “The history of the universe”.
Anyway, Janis only got to cruise the hilly streets of beat city in a car that probably would have fitted in perfectly for a short time before some fiend knicked it and, worse, painted it grey.
Jan got the Porsche back, her manager Bert Grossman borrowed it for a while before the family took it back, repaired it, re-created Richard’s original art, displayed it and then RM Auctions restored it and is selling it in its Driven By Disruption auction next month. My guess is you’ll pay close to $800,000 for a little bit of Janis’s heart.
To read the rest of the article, including my picks for Mercedes at auction right now, head over to The Australian.
