Enjoy! And if you feel so inclined, here’s a link to the Amazon page where you can purchase the book.

Janis Joplin: Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

Introduction

On Saturday afternoon, June 17, 1967, a band with the unlikely name of Big Brother and the Holding Company took to the stage of the Monterey International Pop Festival at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, eighty miles south of San Francisco.

Big Brother’s lead singer, a young woman named Janis Joplin, was nervous. She’d been singing with Big Brother for a year, and so far the group hadn’t made much headway. They weren’t a top draw even in San Francisco, their home town. Now here they were facing their biggest audience yet. Forty thousand people had turned out for the festival, but they were there to see Otis Redding and British imports like The Who and Jimi Hendrix. They weren’t particularly interested in Big Brother, which was why the band had been given a slot on the program on Saturday afternoon, hardly prime time at a rock concert.

A documentary about the festival was being filmed by D. A. Pennebaker that weekend for ABC-TV, but the cameras weren’t pointed at the stage when Big Brother and Janis Joplin launched into “Down on Me, “Road Block” and “Ball and Chain.” Instead they were pointed at the audience, where they captured the overwhelmed response of Mama Cass of the hit group the Mamas and the Papa. “Mouth agape, her ears were in music lover’s heaven,” wrote Laura Joplin, Janis Joplin’s sister, in her book Love, Janis.[i]

When Big Brother finished its set, the audience exploded. The organizers were dumfounded. Critics were ecstatic. Jazz critic Nat Hentoff wrote that Janis’s performance left him limp and feeling that he’d been “in contact with an overwhelming life force.” Greil Marcus, another critic, noted that Janis went so far out that he wondered how she ever managed to get back.[ii]

“When I sing,” Janis Joplin once said, “I feel, oh, I feel, well, like when you’re first in love…I feel chills, weird feelings slipping all over my body, it’s a supreme emotional and physical experience.”[iii]

At Monterey Pop, the audience felt the same way when they heard Janis Joplin perform. Brought back for an encore to ensure that this time, their performance would be filmed, Janis and Big Brother wowed the audience again.

For Janis, it was vindication. Letting her feelings take hold, letting it “all hang out,” in the slang of the time, had been something she’d always been counseled against, something that had led to taunts and ridicule in high school and beyond. But now, she said, “I’ve made feeling work for me, through music, instead of destroying me. It’s superfortunate. Man, if it hadn’t been for the music, I probably would have done myself in.”[iv]

Before Monterey Pop, few people had heard of Janis Joplin.

Afterward, almost everyone had. For the next three years, like a falling star, she would blaze a trail of outrageous behavior and incredible music across the pop-culture sky of 1960s America.

But then, also like a falling star, her light would abruptly go out.

Chapter 1: Frilled Frocks and Bridge

The short but eventful life of Janis Joplin began in what might be considered the most unlikely of places: Port Arthur, Texas.

Port Arthur, located in southeast Texas just off the Gulf of Mexico and just west of the Louisiana border, was founded (and named) by Kansas railway promoter Arthur E. Stilwell. Stilwell wanted to link Kansas City to the Gulf of Mexico by rail, because he had just launched the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad. He and his backers acquired land on the western shore of Sabine Lake, a freshwater lake just inland from the Gulf and connected to it by a natural opening known as Sabine Pass.

Stillwell wanted the new city to be both a major tourist resort and an important seaport. A canal was cut along the western edge of the lake, connecting the site of the new town to deep water at Sabine Pass. Port Arthur was formally incorporated in 1898.[v]

Because Stillwell wanted Port Arthur to be a tourist destination as well as a major port, he planned beautiful broad boulevards and avenues and grand homes along the lakeshore. But early in the twentieth century Stillwell lost financial control of the project to John W. Gates, a Wall Street speculator whose nickname was “Bet-a-Million” and who had made his fortune selling barbed wire across the West. (The company he formed eventually became the giant corporation U.S. Steel.)[vi]

Gates extended and deepened the canal so that ships could sail it all the way to the cities of Beaumont and Orange. Unfortunately, that cut off Port Arthur from the lakeshore, ruining the view of the expensive lakeside homes and reducing Port Arthur’s appeal as a tourist destination.[vii]

That appeal faded further as Port Arthur became inextricably linked to the burgeoning Texas oil industry. By the 1960s, the town buildings seemed almost lost among the huge oil refineries, storage tanks and chemical plants. And since in those days natural gas was simply released into the air, the whole “Golden Triangle,” as the region encompassing the towns of Port Arthur, Orange and Beaumont is known, smelled like rotten eggs. Reportedly, at Lamar Tech, the college Janis Joplin would some day (briefly) attend, the fumes from a nearby sulfur plant were sometimes strong enough to melt the girls’ nylons.[viii]

But oil also means money, and good jobs, and it was the need for both that brought Janis’s parents to Port Arthur before she was born.

The flapper and the bootlegger

Dorothy East and Seth Joplin met in Amarillo, Texas, on a blind date. Dorothy, the daughter of Cecil and Laura East (nee Hansen), was known in Amarillo for her beautiful singing. She particularly liked Broadway show tunes, and in high school she won the lead role in a citywide stage production. The Broadway director the organizers brought in told Dorothy he could get her work in New York, but he recommended against it, because “those people just aren’t your kind of folks.”[ix] She took his advice and instead applied to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Disappointed that the university had only one voice teacher, who only taught opera, she returned to Amarillo after a single year and began helping at a radio station, KGNC. She was known as a “free spirit,” scandalizing her parents by adopting the “flapper” styles of short hair, close-fitting dresses, snazzy hats and high heels. She also smoked and once accidentally swore on-air.[x]

In other words, she showed flashes of the same rebelliousness for which her daughter would later be notorious.

Seth Joplin was the son of Seeb (who ran the Amarillo stockyards) and Florence Joplin (nee Porter). At the time he met Dorothy East, he was taking a break from engineering studies at Texas A&M—studies he never finished: a lack of money forced him to give up his schooling still one semester shy of a degree. A bit of a rebel himself, he made bathtub gin during the last days of Prohibition and smoked marijuana (which was legal then). While courting Dorothy, he took the only job he could find, as a gas station attendant. Dorothy worked as a credit clerk in the local Montgomery Ward department store, eventually becoming head of the department.[xi]

In 1935, in the depths of the Depression, Seth got a break: his best friend from college recommended him for a job at the Texas Company (later Texaco) in Port Arthur. Dorothy quit her job to follow, and soon found work in the credit department at Sears. With two incomes they were finally able to afford to marry, which they did on October 20, 1936.

Seth worked at the only Texaco plant that made containers for petroleum. When the Second World War broke out, his job was considered so vital that although he was called to join the armed forces three times, each time he was deferred.

Shortly after Seth and Dorothy married, Dorothy’s parents’ marriage broke up. Dorothy’s mother, Laura, and her younger sister, Mimi, came to live with Seth and Dorothy. Needing more space, they bought their first house, a two-bedroom brick bungalow on the edge of town. For fun, Dorothy and Seth liked to cross the Sabine River and party in the bars in Vinton, Louisiana.

In mid-1942, Dorothy became pregnant. Janis Lyn Joplin was born at 9:30 a.m. on January 19, 1943.

Janis Joplin makes her entrance

Janis was three weeks early and weighed only five and a half pounds, but she throve. After all, she had parents, a grandmother and an aunt doting on her. (However, Laura and Mimi moved out to a place of their own when Janis was three.)[xii]

As a child, Janis wasn’t rebellious at all. In fact, Dorothy Joplin said later she was easy to care for—not too docile, but not overactive, either—and cheerful by nature.

Janis’s mother, who believed a mother’s place was at home, quit her job to look after Janis full time. She made her beautiful dresses and blouses with ruffles and ribbons and frills, and took her to the First Christian Church for church school, which Dorothy eventually taught.

Seth, who started work at 5:30 a.m., got to spend time with his daughter when he got home in the afternoon. Janis would wait for him on the front porch, he’d give her a hug, and they’d sit and talk.

One day Dorothy overheard her husband telling Janis about making bathtub gin in college. “’Is that the proper topic for a conversation with a child?’ she asked him later,” Laura Joplin, Janis’s younger sister, wrote in her biography of Janis, Love, Janis. “Pop refused to argue the point; instead, he quit spending the evening time visiting with Janis on the front step. Janis was crushed and never knew why.”[xiii]

Janis’s mother introduced her daughter to music well before she started school. She bought an old upright piano and taught Janis how to play it. “She and Janis sat on the piano bench together, with Janis singing the simple nursery songs Dorothy taught her,” Laura wrote. “Janis often lay in bed at night singing those songs, over and over, to put herself to sleep.”[xiv]

But Janis’s father found the noise of a child practicing scales annoying. As well, Dorothy had recently undergone an operation to remove her thyroid gland. The operation destroyed her singing voice (although her speaking voice was fine). Seth Joplin thought having the piano around would be too emotionally painful for his wife, so the piano was sold, ending Janis’s first flirtation with formal musical training.[xv]

In 1949, after two miscarriages, the Joplins had a second child, Laura Lee, and moved to a larger three-bedroom house at 3130 Lombardy Drive, in a neighborhood called Griffing Park. Four years later, in 1953, Janis’s brother Michael Ross was born.

Janis was bright, friendly and inquisitive. Laura wrote, “She had a full face, small, twinkling blue eyes, a broad forehead that Mother always said showed her intellect, and fine, silky blond hair that had a soft curl in it…People might have found her features plain if a buoyant spirit and zest for life hadn’t overshadowed her looks. She was a child who liked people. She always made strangers welcome. Her sensitivity to others showed in a considerate willingness to go out of her way to include others in play.”[xvi]

Aside from singing herself to sleep and singing in the church choir (and, in junior high school, in the Glee Club), Janis showed no particular aptitude for or interest in music. She was much more interested in art. She began to draw as soon as she could hold a pencil. Her mother even arranged private art lessons for her when she was in the third and fourth grades.

Janis also loved to read, a love that continued throughout her life. She learned to read before she entered school and had a library card even before that.

Janis Joplin: her own tall tale?

Dorothy Joplin said that Janis particularly loved magical, fantastical tales. (In one of the letters in Laura Joplin’s book Love Janis, Janis recommends J.R.R. Tolkien’s books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to her younger sister.)

“She studied about the theater. She studied ‘tall tales of America,’” Dorothy said. She wondered if some of the over-the-top accounts of her own escapades Janis told the press once she became famous were her own versions of those tall tales.

“She’d spin these tales. It was so far out that you were supposed to understand that it was that way. She tried the same thing with the press–in my opinion. And it backfired.

“I overlooked that marvelous capacity of hers to trust people.”[xvii]

Janis even began writing her own plays in the first grade and staging them with her friends as puppet shows in a puppet theatre her mother built for her in the back yard.

A “strikingly timid child”

Janis entered junior high with a good but unspectacular academic record. Several of her childhood friends moved out of town when she was in the sixth grade, and she had to ride a bus to the junior high, which was further away than her grade school had been. She found the rowdy kids on the bus frightening—she was a “strikingly timid child,” Myra Friedman wrote[xviii]—but once she started traveling to junior high via a car pool instead of on the bus, she adjusted quickly. Her mother didn’t remember any behavioral problems at all. “I even worried about it a little,” she said. “She never did anything for me to correct!”[xix]

The limitations of Port Arthur meant that finding something interesting for the whole family to do took some imagination on the part of Janis’s father. He hit upon taking them down to the Post Office to look at the Wanted posters. “It was a little unusual,” he agreed later, “but it was somewhere to go. That wasn’t the real reason, the Wanted Men. We’d just roam around the deserted building and read about all the people who were wanted for murders. We’d go any unusual place we could.”[xx]

Everyone who knew Janis when she was a child praised her when Myra Friedman interviewed them not long after Janis’s death. “Janis helped out in the library; Janis helped out at the church. Janis won an artwork contest for the cover of a junior high publication; Janis did posters for the library. Janis was cooperative; Janis was shy. Janis was ‘just like everybody else,’” she wrote.[xxi]

But in junior high, as Janis approached adolescence, signs began to appear that perhaps Janis wasn’t “just like everybody else” after all. Her teachers began to give her unsatisfactory marks in work habits and citizenship because she “talked too much and didn’t get her work done on time,” her sister Laura noted. “…She was more inquisitive and energetic than the school program allowed.” [xxii] She was also, according to her friends, naïve and gullible, someone who could be led to believe all kinds of preposterous stories and who was always eager to please other people.[xxiii]

Janis did all the things expected of a proper young girl in Port Arthur in the 1950s. She joined the Junior Reading Circle for Culture, and Tri Hi Y club, and the Glee Club, which gave her her first public singing opportunity outside of church: she sang a solo in the Christmas pageant. She even took bridge lessons. (Bridge was a passion of her parents’.) In fact, she met her first boyfriend, Jack Smith, when they played bridge together in the seventh grade in the Ladies Aid Society’s ‘Bridge for Cultural Improvement’ club.[xxiv]

Despite occasional problems with talking too much in class or doodling when she should have been taking notes, Janis seemed destined to sail smoothly into Port Arthur society, following the course prescribed for young ladies: high school, university, marriage, house, kids.

But in high school, smooth sailing gave way to stormy waters.

I came away from the project with a great admiration for William Bligh, who is surely one of the more grievously wronged-by-history men in the history of the British Empire.

Here’s the introduction and about half of the (very long) first chapter of The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie.

And, of course, a link to where you can buy it on Amazon!

***

Introduction

Boom!

The single cannon shot from HMS Duke rang out over the choppy gray water of England’s Portsmouth Harbor. It was 8 A.M. on Wednesday, September 12, 1792, and the Duke had just hoisted a flag indicating that a court martial was in process.

Thirty minutes later, ten prisoners were led from the gun room of HMS Hector and loaded aboard one of the Hector’s boats. British Marines in bright red uniform jackets stood at attention as the boat’s crew dipped their oars and began the journey to the Duke, moored in the outer harbor.

More than an hour later, with the Marines still standing at attention, the boat reached the Duke. The prisoners were formally taken aboard, and then led into the captain’s great cabin at the very stern of the ship to face the twelve captains who would serve as their judges and the Judge Advocate who would run the court. Also present were the prisoners’ counselors, and various witnesses.

The Judge Advocate, Moses Greetham, began reading from the “Circumstantial letter” which laid out the details of the case: the ten men were accused of mutiny, a crime punishable by death.

Specifically, they were accused of the most famous mutiny of all time: the mutiny on His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, the ship once commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh.

For more than two centuries now, that mutiny has captured the imagination of the world, inspiring histories, plays, novels, at least one stage musical, and five motion pictures.

Oddly enough, it all started with breadfruit.

Chapter 1: The Voyage of the Bounty

In 1688, while sailing around the world, a naturalist (and occasional pirate) named William Dampier noted an interesting new fruit from the island of Guam:

“The bread-fruit (as we call it) grows on a large tree…The fruit…is of a round shape and has a thick tough rind. When the fruit is ripe it is yellow and soft; and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of this island use it for bread: they gather it when full grown while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven…the inside is soft, tender, and white.”[i]

Later explorers, including Captain Cook (the first European to visit Hawaii and Australia) also extolled the virtues of the breadfruit. The fruit was so much like bread that sailors actually preferred it to their own bread. (That’s not surprising, since the bread served in the middle of a long voyage was a kind of cracker made of flour, water, and salt known as “hardtack” or “ship’s biscuit.” Ship’s biscuit was so hard it often had to be soaked before it could be eaten. It was also occasionally infested by the worm-like larvae of beetles.)

As early as 1775, the Society for West India Merchants saw the potential in breadfruit as a source of food for slave on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The Society offered a hundred pounds to the first person who could bring living breadfruit trees to England.

A Passion for Botany

Among those with businesses interests in the West Indies was Joseph Banks. Born in 1743, Banks was independently wealthy and passionately interested in natural history—particularly botany, the study of plants. When he was twenty-one he collected numerous never-before-seen specimens of plants along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, England’s top scientific society, when he was just twenty-three.

He next joined Captain James Cook aboard the Endeavour when he set sail in August 1768 to carry British astronomers to Tahiti to observe the planet Venus crossing the disk of the sun.

The ship’s visit to Tahiti seized the public’s imagination upon the Endeavour’s return to England in 1771, even though the island had first been reached by an English ship four years earlier. Banks had a lot to do with the public’s sudden interest. He returned with thousands of specimens, drawings and paintings.

In 1778, after a final voyage to Iceland, Banks was elected president of the Royal Society. For decades, very few expeditions of science or exploration were undertaken without his consultation.

Banks wrote and received tens of thousands of letters from all over the world, full of questions and scientific observations. More than a few urged that the breadfruit tree be imported as a new food source for the West Indies.

Banks could see the fruit’s potential. He convinced the British government to mount an official expedition, announced in February 1787, to bring back specimens of the plant.

A former merchant ship called the Bethia, approved by Banks, was purchased and renamed His Majesty’s Armed Vessel (HMAV) Bounty. (The Bounty was too small to qualify for the designation His Majesty’s Ship [HMS]).

Command of The Bounty was awarded to Lieutenant William Bligh.

Enter William Bligh

William Bligh, born September 9, 1754, was the son of Francis Bligh, customs officer at Plymouth, and Jane Pearce, a widow Francis had married just ten months earlier.

Reality vs. the Movie: A Cabin Boy at Age Seven?

Throughout this book, we’ll be comparing real-life events to the way they were described or depicted in the 1984 movie The Bounty, produced by Dino de Laurentiis. In that movie, Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) tells Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) that he has been at sea since he was twelve.

In fact, William Bligh first appears in naval records as a ship’s servant on the Monmouth at the age of seven—but it’s unlikely he actually went to sea at that age.

In the 1700s, Royal Navy captains would often enter youngsters from well-connected families onto the books, providing them with valuable “sea time.” Sea time was important because, to become a lieutenant, a young man had to appear on a ship’s roster for six years, and serve as a midshipman or master’s mate for at least two years of the six.[ii] Appearing on a ship’s roster at a young age allowed the boy to step straight into a midshipman’s position and take his lieutenant’s exam sooner.

Bligh probably first went to sea for real at age sixteen, shortly after his mother died.

In 1770 Bligh signed on to the Hunter as an able seaman. This was a typical classification for potential officers on ships where all the positions for midshipmen—officers in training—were filled. Six months later a midshipman’s position opened up, and Bligh was promoted.

From ages seventeen to twenty Bligh served as a midshipman on the Crescent, sailing to Tenerife and the West Indies. In 1774 he joined the Ranger, temporarily reduced to able seaman again, as she hunted smugglers in the Irish Sea.

At age twenty-one, Bligh learned that Captain Cook had selected him as sailing master of the Resolution for Cook’s third expedition. Cook must have heard a good report of Bligh’s navigational capabilities. He may also have known of Bligh’s talent for drawing. Cook wanted all his officers to be able to construct charts and accurately sketch the various places in which the ship might anchor.[iii]

Sailing with Captain Cook

With Cook, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), New Zealand, Tahiti, and various Pacific islands. Cook also sailed up the west coast of North America in a failed search for the Northwest Passage (a more direct route from Europe to the Pacific that would avoid the stormy seas around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America).

Bligh must have paid close attention to Cook’s methods for keeping his crew healthy on long voyages, because he later implemented some of those methods on the Bounty. Second to Cook himself, he was responsible for creating charts and surveys, and also drew accurate sketches of birds, animals, and landscapes.

On February 14, 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, Bligh witnessed the murder of Captain Cook by natives. In Bligh’s view, the murder happened because the Marines guarding Cook did not do their duty.[iv] The tragedy affected Bligh not only personally but professionally. Bligh’s family connections were just good enough to get him into the Navy as a midshipman, but he had been counting on Cook’s influence to help further his career. (In the Royal Navy in that era, who you knew was often more important than what you knew.)

In February 1781, Bligh married Elizabeth Betham on the Isle of Man. After serving on a variety of ships for a few months near the end of the American Revolution, Bligh ended up on the Isle of Man with his wife and new daughter. In the scaled-back peacetime Navy, no officer’s berths were available.

The peacetime Navy paid only two shillings a day, so Bligh had to find work. The Navy granted his request for permission to sail on merchant ships. From mid-1783 until he was appointed commander of the Bounty, he commanded ships belonging to his wife’s wealthy uncle, Duncan Campbell, carrying goods from England to the West Indies and returning with rum and sugar.

His careful drawings and proven navigational skills probably recommended him to the Admiralty as commander of Sir Joseph Banks’s breadfruit expedition. Navigational skills were important because, once he’d retrieved breadfruit from Tahiti, the Admiralty wanted him to chart the Endeavour Straits, a narrow, dangerous passage separating Australia (then called New Holland) and New Guinea).[v] Cook had run aground there. The Admiralty hoped Cook’s sailing master might do better.

There’s no evidence Banks ever met Bligh. But Bligh, knowing the career value of a powerful patron, thanked Banks profusely for command of the Bounty, and wrote: “I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust…”[vi]

HMAV Bounty

The Bounty was a three-masted merchant vessel, built just 2 1/2 years earlier. She was 85 feet, 1 1/2 inches long on the upper deck and 24 feet 4 inches wide. At just 220 tons, she was much smaller than any of Cook’s ships had been.

Because she was so small, she was rated as a cutter. That mattered because a cutter did not rate a captain or a commander as a commanding officer, but only a lieutenant. That, in turn, meant Bligh would not be getting a promotion, as he had hoped.

On a voyage expected to last at least two years, the difference between a lieutenant’s and commander’s pay was considerable. Bligh would earn just £70 a year. (As a merchant captain under Duncan Campbell, he’d been earning £500.) All the Navy offered was the assurance that that he would be promoted upon his return.[vii]

The Bounty was unusual in other ways, thanks to modifications Joseph Banks had insisted upon. All that mattered to Banks was the return of breadfruit, and, he wrote, “…the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.”[viii]

The most notable modification from Bligh’s point of view must have been the loss of the great cabin, the commanding officer’s private quarters. Normally the great cabin was as wide as the ship and extended from the stern almost to the main mast, with windows on three sides providing plenty of light. But on the Bounty, the great cabin had been turned into a breadfruit nursery. It was filled with shelves, cut with holes to receive 629 pots. It had special ventilation, a stove for warmth, a drainage system that caught and recycled excess water, and more. Bligh had to make do with a windowless cabin, eight by seven feet. He would eat in a small, cramped pantry.

The Bounty’s small size meant a smallish crew. Bligh would be the only commissioned officer. Warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. Bligh decided not to hire a purser, who normally bought provisions from the Navy Board, tracked them and doled them out on the voyage, and sold back unused ones at the end. Instead, Bligh would look after the disbursement of stores himself.

Most fatefully, the ship would not carry any Marines, who on most Navy ships served as the captain’s security and police force.

For this week’s Saturday special, the introduction (complete with footnotes!) to Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky. Which you can purchase here, if you’re interested!

**

Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky

By Edward Willett

Introduction

Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 24, 1966, a young black man stepped off a Pan American Airlines airplane at London’s Heathrow Airport. All he had with him was $40 in borrowed cash, a small bag containing a change of clothes, pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma face cream…and his guitar.[i]

But a guitar was all he really needed. Within an extraordinarily short time, that young man would be famous around the world. Decades later, he’s still famous: “King Jimi,” a “guitar god,” the “master of electric-guitar sound and style.”[ii]

Later that same evening, Jimi Hendrix was onstage at The Scotch of St. James, a club that attracted people in the music industry. As he started to play, the club fell silent.

“He was just amazing,” Kathy Etchingham, then just twenty-four and soon to be Jimi’s girlfriend (one of many), recalled. “People had never seen anything like it.”[iii]

Among the musicians in the crowd was Eric Burdon of the Animals. His take: “It was haunting how good he was. You just stopped and watched.”[iv]

Burdon was the first famous guitarist to be awed by Hendrix’s ability. He wouldn’t be the last. On January 11, 1967, Hendrix and his new band, The Experience, played at a basement club called the Bag O’Nails in the Soho district of London.

Hendrix had been in England just three and a half months (and had spent several weeks touring France and Germany with the Experience), but that night his show was attended by rock greats Pete Townshend and John Entwhistle of the Who, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr of the Beatles (plus their manager, Brian Epstein), Mick Jagger and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck…and many others.[v]

People all over the world stopped and watched when Jimi Hendrix played…but it all ended on September 18, 1970, when he died in London at the age of twenty-seven.

Jimi Hendrix crammed a lot into his short life. The consummate rebel, he somehow fought his way past every barrier that rose between him and his lifelong dream of stardom. He rebelled against his father, who thought his music was a waste of time. He rebelled against the strict regimentation of the bands in which he played as a back-up guitarist. He rebelled against the expectation that he would limit himself to playing for black audiences. He rebelled against conventional notions of how the electric guitar should be played. He rebelled against conventional ideas of sexual morality. And, tragically and fatally, he rebelled against restrictions on his use of drugs.

Tony Palmer, a friend of Hendrix’s who today is a renowned director of music documentaries, wrote in The Observer newspaper on September 20, 1970, “Whatever Mozart and Tchaikovsky have come to mean to lovers of classical music, Hendrix meant the same if not more to a whole generation.”[vi] He added, “Jimi Hendrix was born Jimi Hendrix. Great musicians are not created; they are born. Jimi was meant for music.”[vii]

Looking back, it seems as if Jimi Hendrix was always meant to be a star. Certainly he always thought so. But for most of his life, stardom seemed a very long way away…

*

Case in point: the release last week of a research report on exciting new progress in gene therapy for hemophiliacs.

Back in 2001, I wrote a book on hemophilia for the Enslow Publishers series Diseases and People (<brag>School Library Journal called it: “An excellent resource for basic research for personal or academic use.”</brag>).

Gene therapy—the insertion of genes into living cells in the human body to treat disorders—has always seemed to hold particular promise for the treatment of hemophilia because it is a genetic disease: you can’t catch it, you can only inherit it.

What is hemophilia? Allow me to quote my own book:

“Hemophilia is a disease in which a person’s blood does not clot properly. People with hemophilia do not produce enough of one of several proteins in the blood called clotting factors.  The body needs these factors to stop bleeding after an injury. Without these factors, bleeding lasts longer than it would otherwise…

“Hemophilia affects males almost exclusively. About one in 5,000 boy babies has hemophilia. It is passed on from generation to generation by women who may or may not show bleeding-related symptoms themselves. In about one third of the cases, there is no family history of hemophilia…

“The primary symptoms of hemophilia are abnormal bruising and bleeding. In toddlers, falls and bumps may cause skin bruises and bleeding from the lips and tongue. In older children and adults, bleeding may involve muscles and joints, producing painful swelling and hindering movement. If early treatment is not given, this bleeding can result in permanent joint damage.  Head injuries are particularly dangerous for hemophiliacs…bleeding into the brain can be fatal. Bleeding may also occur in the face, neck, or throat, obstructing breathing. Bleeding from the mouth, gums, and the nose may be troublesome, as well…

“The standard treatment in the event of bleeding is to inject the hemophiliac with the missing blood clotting factor, made from either donated plasma or by using recombinant gene technology. This can be done on a regular preventative basis, usually three times a week, just before undertaking an activity that could cause bleeding, or as needed to treat episodes of bleeding…

Hemophilia is, in short, a nasty condition indeed. Prior to the First World War, the average lifespan for a boy with hemophilia was 11. Prior to 1968, it was only 20. By 1983 it was 64…but during the 1980s it dropped again due to the impact of AIDS, which hemophiliacs contracted through the injection of blood clotting factor made from donated, infected plasma (young Ryan White, who graces the cover of my book, was one of the most high-profile victims).

Since 1999, the average lifespan has been normal, but treatment still involves regular injections of clotting factors.

The only way to cure hemophilia would be to replace the missing genes that code for the production of clotting factors…and that’s precisely what researchers from the University College London Cancer Institute and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis have just reported success with.

Their technique used a modified adeno-associated virus, or AAV (which infects human cells but doesn’t cause disease) to insert the gene which produces clotting factor IX (FIX), into liver cells. Their test subjects were six people with severe Hemophilia B. (About one in five people with hemophilia have Hemophilia B; the more common Hemophilia A, which involves a different clotting factor, offers a more complex target for gene therapy, so much of the research has focused on Hemophilia B.)

Before the therapy, the six patients all produced FIX at less than one percent of normal levels. After the therapy, each produced FIX at between two and 11 percent of normal. In the short-term follow-up of six to 16 months, four of the participants no longer needed infusions of FIX at all, while the other two required them less frequently than before.

Molecular Therapy magazine, reporting on preliminary results of the study back in March, enthused that it represented nothing less than the “holy grail” of hemophilia gene therapy.

It also renders my 10-year-old book out-of-date. But you know what? After researching all the tragedy and suffering hemophilia has caused down through the years, I’m okay with that.

I just hope all the other books I wrote, on Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, meningitis and Ebola, are also rendered obsolete—the sooner, the better.

The first book was Meningitis. Stiff neck? You bet. Of course, I was sitting and typing for hours on end, but I’m sure that was just a coincidence. I also wrote Arthritis (my fingers are still stiff), Ebola Virus (Ebola starts with flu-like symptoms; gee, thanks, that’s specific!), Alzheimer’s Disease (which I can barely even remember writing) and Hemophilia, which at least had the advantage of being a genetic disorder that you’re born with, so it wasn’t anything I could catch.

But just because I’m not writing books about diseases any more doesn’t free me from the tendency to suspect that every minor symptom that crops up could be the sign of the fatal disease or debilitating condition I’m always sure is lurking around the next birthday. (And yes, I did turn 50 a couple of years ago…why do you ask?)

Headache? Brain tumor! Tingling sensation? Multiple sclerosis! Itch? Incurable skin infection!

What I’m really suffering from, of course is cyberchondria: hypochondria exacerbated by the plethora of medical information available, just a few keystrokes away, on the Internet.

This is so common a condition that there’s a Wikipedia entry for it, and where better to turn to information about an Internet-fueled problem than Wikipedia?

Hmm. On second thought, let’s turn to the New York Times.

In an article dated November 25, 2008, John Markoff wrote about the results of a study, conducted by Microsoft, of health-related Web searches on popular search engines, combined with a survey of the company’s employees. “The study,” Markoff wrote, “suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.”

Well, duh. But why?

Which isn’t to say you should ignore symptoms, of course; but you shouldn’t jump to conclusions, either. Star Trek: Voyager may have featured a computer-generated doctor, but for the moment, you’re better off going to the real thing.

Oh, and avoid writing books about diseases. That’ll help, too.

The photo: December hoarfrost, Regina, Saskatchewan

Here are the covers (and the back-cover copy) for each:

Johnny Cash: The Man in Black

When country music legend Johnny Cash took the stage at Folsom State Prison in 1968, he solidified the public’s perception of him as a rebel who followed his own path. Born in Arkansas during the Great Depression, Cash endured poverty, the death of his older brother, and a difficult relationship with his father. He turned to gospel and country music to express the pain, and after many years of struggling, his songs of hardship and hope would finally reach the ears of those waiting for an artist who represented them, ordinary people fighting to survive.

Johnny Cash’s career spanned almost fifty years, with thousands of songs, hundreds of albums, and even a telvision show to his name. Even after his death in 2003, new albums continue to be released, and the 200t bipic Walk the Line brought “the man in black” to life for a new generation. From spiritual hymns to rock ballads, his influence transcended all genres and “the voice of America” lives on.

Buy Johnny Cash: The Man in Black from Amazon.com.

Andy Warhol: Everyone Will be Famous for 15 Minutes

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol became the most famous creator of a new style of art called pop art, which transformed mass-produced items of popular culture into fine works of art. From Campbell’s Soup cans to photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol’s willingness to use anything and everything from the mass media in his work expanded the range of subject matter available to artists. His avant-garde films, artistic usage of American icons, and unconventional social life made him a controversial figure, both greatly admired and deeply reviled. A trendsetter rather than a trend-follower, a dispassionate observer of both the seamy and celebrity sides of life, Warhol was a true American rebel.

Buy Andy Warhol: Everyone Will be Famous for 15 Minutes from Amazon.com.

Narrator Ezra Knight

Narrator Ezra Knight does an absolutely fabulous job, not surprising considering what an accomplished actor he is. In fact, as I started listening to the book, I had to get out my print copy because it sounded so good I actually thought they must have rewritten the introduction–but no, those were my words!

According to a letter the publisher sent along with the two copies of the audiobook I received, this is the first Enslow Publishers title to be recorded as a full audio book. I feel honoured!

Also, I’m really enjoying listening to my own book. I usually read my own stuff out loud. Nice to hear someone else for a change!

“Science is a verb.” that is what science teachers tell their students, and this book describes just that. I found the book to be an exciting collection of seven scientists doing their jobs, and sometimes I was jealous. As scientist, Marta Guerra, describes, “for people who like to do fairly exciting things… you feel like you are actually helping people, [disease hunting in Uganda] is a wonderful experience.” The book is scientifically accurate, and, with a bird flu expert hinting about new emerging pandemics, the book is very current. It is engaging and packed with a great deal of information. The Levels of Containment that we often read about describes measles as a level two disease, where gloves, face protection, gowns, and splash guards are used. It is a good thing that our mothers never knew that. For your information, E. coli is only level one. If you did not know what bat guano is, the explanation is seamlessly woven into the text. Zoonotic is a word I have been hearing more about, and this book teaches young readers what it means: diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans. Scientist Laurie Richardson says that “being a scientist is like being a kid all you life” because there is so much fun and learning to do. Scientist Jonathan Runstadler’s job is to track the bird flu. To do that, he swabs bird bottoms, which may not sound like fun, but, for people such as me, it beats sitting in a cubical working on spreadsheets. This is a great read. Reviewer: RevaBeth Russell

Here’s the description from the back of the book:

“The Bounty was a British ship visiting Tahiti in 1789 when some of the crew overthrew the captain, William Bligh, and set him adrift in a tiny boat with sailors loyal to him. The mutiny resulted in a number of trials—both of the men who mutinied and of Bligh for losing command of his ship. These fascinating events have been the source for numerous Hollywood movies, most recently The Bounty. In The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie, Edward Willett explores the famous case and the movies it inspired.”

There’s also a nice blurb:

“The mutiny on the Bounty is one of the most misunderstood events in maritime history. Here, Edward Willett reveals the true events behind that episode, and attempts to explain why these have been obscured from popular memory by filmmakers who rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story. But, as Willett shows, the truth—if less romantic than fiction—is equally fascinating.” – Timothy G. Lynch, PhD, Assistant Professor, Maritime History, California Maritime Academy, California State University.

I daresay it’s the only book I’ll ever write which has Mel Gibson on the cover!

Here’s the blurb from the back:

Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how these “disease detectives” are coming up with new wayts to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too!

I’d seen that before. What I hadn’t seen, until the books arrived today, was this very nice cover quote from Jonathan M. Samet, MD, Professor and Flora L. Thornton Chair, Director, Institute for Global Health, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (quite the title!):

“This book captures the excitement and significance of epidemiology and the hard work of being an epidemiologist. It is a great starting point for those who want to benefit world health by becoming an epidemiologist.”

Very nice. And now that I have my author’s copies, I can get the book entered into the Saskatchewan Book Awards before the first deadline of July 31.