"She came out of the swamps of the Texas-Louisiana border, wailing the blues as no one, black or white, before or after, has ever dared. She was the first rock star of the 1960s counterculture. She was a major fashion trendsetter in the back-to-the-roots movement that began in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and overtook the world. At the same time, she was locked in a doomed search for an increasingly elusive happiness in drugs and fame, sex and money, a compulsion of truly epic proportions that ultimately destroyed her. To those who knew and loved her intimately, she was Pearl. To an enthralled public, she was Janis Joplin, the greatest female singer in the history of rock and roll." "Now, in PEARL, the most definitive biography of rock legend Janis Joplin ever published, bestselling author Ellis Amburn interviews scores of personalities both famous and unknown, travels to the places where Janis was born, lived, and died, and reveals facts about Janis' life and death that have remained in shadow, until now. Here is the real Janis Joplin - both the magic as well as the tragic - as she's never been seen or understood before." "Leaving her past as the shy wallflower of Port Arthur, Texas, behind her, Janis followed the lure to San Francisco in 1966. Rocketing to prominence as the electrifying lead vocalist for Big Brother and the Holding Company, she invented her own brand of rock blues at the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom, later taking her musical gifts higher and wider to a nationwide audience eager to experience Janis as a powerful artist in her own right." "Both her music and her life embodied the headlong, revolutionary spirit of the decade. Here is Janis Joplin in all her fascinating complexity, the performer and seeker, addict and alcoholic, at once timid and brash, cowering in inferiority one minute and abandoned to grandiose gestures the next. Though she could never sustain a love affair, she hurled herself from one relationship to another, from early liaisons with band members and road crew to serious encounters with Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kris Kristofferson, as well as many female lovers. Janis Joplin had more of everything - problems and passion, fame and disgrace, drugs and booze - and attained a super-stardom that, however brief, places her squarely in the first rank of rock immortals, beside Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen. After two decades, she retains this status - a blazing example of one woman's enduring triumph."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved