![]() But I guess we should ask Kris Kristofferson since he wrote the song. Don from Dayton, OhYes, there is a couple different meanings but after she says "I pulled my harpoon out of my dirty red bandana." The next line is "I was playing soft while Bobby sang the blues." So that doesn't sound like she's talking about a hypodermic needle.Kathy from North CarolinaI will always love Janis Joplin!!!."I went, 'With them windshield wipers slapping time and Bobby clapping hands we finally sang up every song the driver knew.' And that was it." The song's final defining image came to Kristofferson as he was driving in heavy rain to the airport for the flight home. And that was where 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose' came from, because he was free from her, and I guess he would have traded all his tomorrows for another day with her." That was 'Somewhere near Salinas, I let her slip away.' Later in the film he (Quinn) hears a woman hanging out her clothes, singing the melody she (Masina) used to play on the trombone, and she told him, 'Oh, she died.' So he goes out, gets drunk, gets into a fight in a bar and ends up on the beach, howling at the stars. At one point, like he did, he drove off and left her there. I had the rhythm of a Mickey Newbury song going in the back of my mind, 'Why You Been Gone So Long,' and I developed this story of these guys who went around the country kind of like Anthony Quinn and Giuletta Masina in (Fellini's) La Strada. "I hid from Fred for a while but I was trying to write that song all the time I was flying around Baton Rouge and New Orleans. He said that he had a song title for the songwriter - "Me And Bobby McKee." Kristofferson recalled in Mojo magazine March 2008 that his label boss suggested: "'You could make this thing about them traveling around, the hook is that he turns out to be a she.'" They would have been a better deal if served out as part of a legit collection of her Woodstock performances, or as a collection of previously unreleased live Joplin performances, if enough high-caliber stuff of the sort was available.The founder of Kristofferson's record label, Fred Foster, rang him just as the struggling musician was about to leave Nashville for his helicopter pilot sideline job. Those songs are actually reasonably good, but aren't worth buying the whole set for. ![]() So what does the set offer to those Joplin fans who already have a lot of her material? Well, not much, but in the time-honored manner of attaching bonus tracks to oft-recycled material, this does have a couple of previously unissued live cuts ("Kozmic Blues" and the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody") from her 1969 set at Woodstock. Including both solo recordings and highlights of her stint with Big Brother & the Holding Company, it has all the songs fans and critics would consider milestones in her career: "Ball and Chain" (a version recorded live in 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, not the more familiar one from Cheap Thrills), "Piece of My Heart," "Down on Me," "Summertime," "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)," "Tell Mama" (the live 1970 performance from the expanded edition of Pearl), "Get It While You Can," "Mercedes Benz," and "Me and Bobby McGee." And there are also good tracks that aren't as overly familiar, like "Coo Coo," "Misery'n," "Maybe," "Work Me, Lord," and "A Woman Left Lonely." The substitution of the less familiar renditions of "Ball and Chain" and "Tell Mama" might rankle some consumers expecting to hear the more common ones, but that's frankly unlikely. With this two-CD set, The Essential Janis Joplin, the label's at it again, though it's a good one to get if you don't want to collect all the Joplin releases, and certainly don't want to get the expensive Joplin boxes, but want more than what fits onto a single disc. Columbia has managed to squeeze an impressive, perhaps excessive, number of compilations out of Janis Joplin's relatively slim body of recordings.
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