Scars of Sweet Paradise
Alice Echols
Virago £18.99, pp408
Buy it at BOL

This biography begins with one of the most vivid accounts of growing up awkward that I have ever read. Janis Joplin was born into a perfectly normal family in Port Arthur, Texas, in l943, with nice, ordinary parents and two nice, ordinary younger siblings.

She always said her childhood was idyllic until she 'lost her looks' at l4. Up to then, she was a pretty child who sang in the church choir. Then she developed terrible acne, failed to be selected for the school cheerleader squad and went spectacularly to the bad.

She became Port Arthur's first female beatnik, frizzed her hair by drying it in the oven, omitted to wear a bra (unheard of in the Fifties) and worked on her unique cackle of a laugh - a friend recalls her asking: 'Was it irritating enough?' Moreover, she deliberately cultivated a reputation as the school slut, although according to a classmate, she didn't actually lose her virginity until she graduated.

When she arrived at the University of Texas in Austin in l962, the campus newspaper profiled her with the headline - 'She Dares to be Different!' She drank, she swore, she hung out with bikers, she went to redneck bars. And soon she started singing with a folk group, not that that was particularly 'different' in the early Sixties.

But what was entirely different was her voice. She could sing like Joan Baez if she wanted to and sometimes did, for parodic effect, but in Austin she cultivated her Bessie Smith growl, and the trick whereby she would seemingly sing two notes at once.

In January l963, abandoning her course at Austin, she hitchhiked to San Francisco to join the Beats, but unfortunately the Beats had largely dispersed and the hippies had not yet arrived. She sang in coffee houses and lived on handouts, and everyone who heard her said they knew she would be huge. But of course in those days there weren't any record company talent scouts looking for ugly women singers with Bessie Smith voices. The folk scene was largely underground and commercially unexploited.

In Austin she was known as a drinker; in San Francisco she became a druggie. Speed was still legal and widely available but when speed became temporarily unavailable, she took to heroin. She later told a reporter: 'I wanted to smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope, anything I could lay my hands on I wanted to do it.'

She felt in some way that she had to earn her right to sing the blues by suffering the blues. But by the summer of l965 she was a wreck, and fled home to Port Arthur, weighing only six stone. She spent a year at home, cleaning up and seriously trying to be good. Her old classmates suddenly saw her wearing frocks and make-up, with her hair neatly tied in a bun, playing canasta and painting a Nativity mural for her parents' porch. Her little sister, Laura, six years younger, was deputed to take her clothes shopping, but Laura had to dash out of the changing-room to buy Janis some underpants.

She went into therapy, re-enrolled in college and talked seriously of becoming a secretary. But then a friend came to fetch her back to San Francisco, to sing with a new band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. In the year she'd been away, San Francisco had suddenly become the hippie capital of the world. Big Brother were a fairly chaotic band when she joined but she soon sharpened them up - she was entirely organised when it came to music.

In June l967, at the start of the Summer of Love, they were booked to play at the Monterey Pop Festival. Their set was in the afternoon, not normally peak time, but everyone who heard Janis went berserk, and the band were quickly booked to play again the next day. Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, offered to manage them, and Columbia Records signed them for $250,000. When she became successful she said: 'I'm not a warthog that nobody wants to climb in bed with. Everybody wants to climb in bed with me now.'

On stage, this dumpy, acne-pocked woman who was always complaining she couldn't get laid, became simply the sexiest woman alive and men and women practically queued to sleep with her. She got through men like Kleenex and made sure the press knew about it, boasting to Rolling Stone about her one-night stand with Joe Namath, the American football star.

But just as she used her boozing to cover her drugs use (she often carried a bottle of Southern Comfort onstage) so she used her much-publicised heterosexual promiscuity to cover her lesbian affairs.

She died in the Landmark Hotel, Los Angeles, on 4 October l970, aged 27. She had spent the day recording and seemed quite happy, though the boyfriend and girlfriend who were meant to be joining her for a threesome failed to show up. She went to her room, presumably shot up, went back down to the hotel lobby to buy some cigarettes, chatted cheerfully to the night porter - and was later found dead in her room, still clutching the cigarettes and change. The autopsy revealed that the heroin she had bought that night was exceptionally pure; in fact, it killed another eight users in Los Angeles that weekend.

Joplin's life could easily have been presented as a banal, cautionary tale of rock'n'roll victimhood but Alice Echols is too intelligent to do that. She resists making Joplin a symbol or a stereotype but presents her sympathetically as the awkward, brave, own-worst-enemy individual she was. The character portrayal is entirely convincing, and so, too, is the historical context.

Echols's previous book was Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, l967-75, and obviously her knowledge of the period informs this biography. Scars of Sweet Paradise is worth reading as a slice of cultural history, even if one has no particular interest in Joplin. Great stuff.