They don’t teach kids about the “old, weird America” in school. Though rooted in fierce independence, its study would scare the goody two-shoes and give the mischievous a head start down the crooked path.
But it?s still out there, well off Interstate 95, far beyond the White Marsh Mall and getting weirder every day. In Port Arthur, Texas, a lakefront town of petroleum refineries, the “old, weird America” echoes in the voice of Janis Joplin, gone almost 40 years now.
“I got treated very badly in Texas,” said Joplin, who wanted to be an artist the way other girls dreamt of a life of glamour. “People thought I was a beatnik, though they?d never seen one and neither had I.”
Joplin performed three times in Maryland before her 1970 death: late July 1969 at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia; Pearl Harbor Day 1969 at the Baltimore Civic Center with Paul Butterfield and Joe Cocker; and mid-June 1970 in College Park.
Gerry Blair, a Loyola College marketing instructor who lives in Lutherville, was at the Civic Center show.
“She looked like a little girl with a lot of makeup, but she blew the crowd away,” Blair said. “She was mysterious. I don’t think anyone knew what she was really like until she was gone.”
Mystery is central to the “old, weird America” ? a phrase that gained currency in 2001 as the title of a Greil Marcus book about Bob Dylan and the gnarled roots of purely American music. It is also the name of a documentary film released last year on Harry Smith, a Chelsea hotel mystic best known as the producer of the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” released on Folkway Records in 1952.
The idea is generally applied to art, the kind at the Visionary Arts Museum on Key Highway: unvarnished music, unschooled painting and the kind of sculpture that rises from junkyards.
While many folks believe they can’t help how they are, citizens of the “old, weird America” are helpless to be anything but who they are.
Like an ugly duckling christened Janis Lyn, an introvert who sang in the choir and painted pictures of Christ on the cross before her coronation as the queen of the hippies.
Joplin is arguably the greatest white female blues singer of them all. To judge how good she was, watch the film of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
“Her Baltimore show exposed a lot of people to music beyond the radio,” said Blair, noting Joplin?s version of “Ball and Chain,” written by her muse, Big Mama Thornton.
“They were both wild, red-hot mamas, and they both liked their hooch,” said Robert Ross, a blues guitarist who played with Big Mama. “But Janis was a flower child. Thornton would sooner give you a rusty shiv than a shrinking violet.”
The undertow of the “old, weird America” is so strong that it sometimes haunts people who don?t know anything about it and wouldn?t mess with it if they did. People like David and Alicia Sanchez.
Mexican immigrants who landed in Port Arthur by way of California, the Sanchez family bought 4330 32nd St. and then wondered why strangers with cameras kept showing up in the front yard.
No one had told them they had bought the house where Janis Joplin grew up. Last Saturday ? on Joplin?s 65th birthday ? a Texas State Historical Marker was planted near a pottery burro on the Sanchez property.
The republic I have been speaking of is a fun-house reflection of the land that gave birth to it. Thus, it is also One Nation Under God. And the belief that the artist is merely a vessel for Something Bigger is key to the work.
Enter James Adam Rougeau, former adolescent Hollywood acid-head turned Port Arthur Pentecostal Christian. Rougeau has 1,200 bricks from the first Joplin home on Procter Street, long demolished. He bought them for $1,000 from a woman who said their authenticity was notarized when she purchased them in 1980.
Rougeau chisels chips off the bricks, calling them “A Piece of My Heart,” after the Joplin song, and “gives them away” for a $5.95 handling charge. He gives the money over to the First United Pentecostal Church of Port Arthur.
“When I bought the bricks it was an investment for me,” the 44-year-old former atheist said. “But now I have committed them to the Lord. God owns these bricks are surely as he owns Janis Joplin?s soul.”
Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books ? fiction, journalism and essays ? include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at [email protected].
