#148, "Mercedes Benz," Janis Joplin

As Janis Joplin herself jokes at the beginning of this recording—made four days before she died—it’s not the most important song she ever wrote. It's my favorite, though, because it captures more of what I imagine she was probably like. Because it's silly and yearning, and nobody's all one-or-the-other all the time.

I heard this song growing up, because it's a famous song by a famous singer and my dad was an old hippie. But I don't think I really noticed it until I was in my mid-twenties, playing a house show in Lexington, Kentucky. A kid—I don't remember his name, but he had to have been in his late teens—played before me and he closed his set with this song. Most of the crowd were teenagers, and they all got really happy when he played it. He flipped his guitar backwards, and pounded on it like a drum to keep the beat, and his voice broke as he sang it and everybody joined in with him, even me. It was a great performance, one of those things I loved best about those shows—a lot of voices at a punk rock house, led by a teenage boy who was really, really into singing this Janis Joplin song. It made me pay a little more attention to her.

Because I loved her music, of course. Big Brother And The Holding Company sounds like Led Zeppelin fronted by the most intense woman ever. Cheap Thrills, where she's belting out "Ball And Chain" over those monster riffs? It's all the stuff I love. But her story is so much bigger than that, and it's about more than the tragedy she carried in her voice—I think so much of how I viewed Janis Joplin was colored by that Leonard Cohen song, and it's easy to think of her as that "fallen robin," but she led a bigger life than that, and she did more than suffer.

It's a testament to her power as a singer that she could carry the emotion that made everyone hold her up as some sort of symbol in a song like "Mercedes Benz." But I like that one of her last songs was funny about it, rather than tragic. It connected with the punker kids down in Lexington, at the very least, and I don't listen to Cheap Thrills very often these days, but I sing "Mercedes Benz" a lot when nobody's around.