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

Alice Echols

Macmillan + ORM, Feb 15, 2000 - Biography & Autobiography - 433 pages

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 OD'd on heroin in October 1970, a generation's 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 Joplin's muscianship and explore a generation's experiment with high-risk living and the terrible price it exacted.

A deeply affecting biography of one of America's most brilliant and tormented stars, Scars of Sweet Paradise is also a vivid and incisive cultural history of an era that changed the world for us all.

Contents

• Introduction: 1954

About the author

Alice Echols, author of Daring to Be Bad ("fascinating"--The Nation), is a leading historian of the sixties. She has taught at UCLA and USC and has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, and the L.A. Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
• Author: Alice Echols
• Edition: unabridged
• Publisher: Macmillan + ORM, 2000
• ISBN: 1466839791, 9781466839793
• Length: 433 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Artists, Architects, Photographers; Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts; Biography & Autobiography / Music