Joplin, whose raw, blues-drenched voice had powered hits like "Piece of My Heart" and "Me and Bobby McGee," died at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood while recording her album Pearl. Her death came just weeks after Jimi Hendrix's, cementing the tragic pattern of rock stars dying at 27 and marking the loss of one of the era's most electrifying live performers.
Janis Joplin had spent the evening of October 3 recording an instrumental track for her new album with her band, then went out for cigarettes and drinks with bandmates at Barney's Beanery before returning alone to her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel. She never showed up for a scheduled recording session the next day; her producer eventually sent someone to check on her, who found her dead on the floor beside her bed.
The cause was an accidental heroin overdose, likely worsened by alcohol, from a batch of unusually pure heroin that had already killed several other users in Los Angeles that week. She was 27, the same age Jimi Hendrix had been when he died just over two weeks earlier, a grim coincidence that later fed the mythology of the so-called 27 Club.
Her final album, Pearl, released posthumously in early 1971, became her best-selling record, powered by the single "Me and Bobby McGee," a song she had recorded just days before her death and never heard mixed. Joplin's raw, unfiltered stage presence at Monterey Pop and Woodstock had already made her one of rock's defining voices, and her death, following Hendrix's by weeks and preceding Jim Morrison's by less than a year, marked a devastating turn for the era's rock aristocracy.
Key people: Janis Joplin