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Porsche

Janis Joplin’s psychedelic Porsche is the most famous rock & roll car of all time.

The custom-painted vehicle epitomizes its owner’s colorful, larger-than-life personality. Though her humorous 1970 song “Mercedes Benz” glorifies another German luxury car – noting that “My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends” – Janis’ Porsche became her trademark, originally in San Francisco and, later, the world.

As a girl growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, cars symbolized freedom to Janis. When she got her driver’s license in 1958, she excitedly commemorated the milestone in her teenage scrapbook. Janis loved driving. Clearly, she envisioned the day she’d be behind the wheel of a sporty coupe.

Janis Joplin’s Porsche in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

After moving to San Francisco in 1966 to join Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis scraped together the cash for a used Sunbeam, a British-made compact. Early on, she wanted to personalize her set of wheels. She enlisted the great poster artist Stanley Mouse to paint Big Brother’s name and the band’s symbol – a God’s eye – on the door. But the funky roadster was a problem child: She lost its key and had to hotwire it, then a hubcap flew off. As Janis wrote her mother, Dorothy Joplin: “It was a nice clean healthy little car, and now it’s an out-&-out beatnik car & it knows it. … The starter motor burned out so I have to push it to start it. Poor thing.  It’s out front, parked on a hill.” A few months later, she informed her father: “My car suffered a tragic breakdown on the streets of Berkeley and is now parked in the alley behind the repair shop waiting for me to raise $75 (!!).”

By the summer of 1968, such woes were a thing of the past. Big Brother and the Holding Company’s first album on Columbia Records, Cheap Thrills, gave Janis the resources to purchase her dream car. After debuting on Billboard on August 31, 1968, Cheap Thrills hit #1 two months later, lodging there for eight weeks. It resided on the album chart for 66 weeks, selling a million copies. Its first single, “Piece of My Heart ” b/w “Turtle Blues,” debuted on the Hot 100 the same day, where it remained for three months, reaching #12.

In September, soon after Janis performed with Big Brother at the Hollywood Bowl, her attorney Bob Gordon drove her to Estes-Zipper Motors in Beverly Hills to buy herself a sports car. A pre-owned 1964 Porsche 356-C cabriolet convertible caught her eye. “They had just put on seventeen coats of oyster lacquer, each rubbed down separately,” Gordon recalled. “It was gorgeous, looked like a pearl.” Though now a bona-fide rock star, Janis was happy about its relatively modest price:  $3,500 (in today’s dollars, about $31,700).

She wrote her parents: “Last week I bought a 1965 [sic] Porsche convertible—very fancy & high class & a great car too.  …  Incredible. Who’d have thought?!! Our record is a success story in itself.  We got a gold album in 3 days!  We go up to #4 on Cashbox next week with a bullet—that means it’s expected to go higher. We’ve been playing bigger & bigger concerts lately, although 20,000 at Newport was the best.  Played the Hollywood Bowl & the Rose Bowl recently.”

Once she drove her car home, Janis commissioned Big Brother’s former equipment manager Dave Richards, a talented artist, to cover the car’s paint job with his surrealistic paintings – for a reported $500. After applying a base coat of Candy Apple Red, he transformed the Porsche with a mélange of hallucinatory imagery: portraits of Big Brother and the Holding Company; Janis’ astrological sign, Capricorn; the Marin County landscape (on the right door); “The Eye of God” (on the hood); and the cosmos, calling it “The History of the Universe.” He even painted under the gas flap a picture of a man’s face spewing his guts. To protect his artwork, Richards covered the entire livery in clearcoat.

By year’s end, Janis was driving the most recognizable car in San Francisco – possibly the state of California. Janis’ former boyfriend David Niehaus recalled that in 1970, “I’d park the Porsche, and by the time we came back, there’d be 150 people around the car. It got old pretty quick.”

One afternoon, Janis’ beloved canine companion George was dognapped from the Porsche, never to be found. Later on the car itself was stolen. The thief tried to repaint it but didn’t get far before giving up. The Porsche was recovered and returned to Janis, who took it back to Richards; Dave removed the thief’s paint splotches, with the clearcoat having preserved the artwork underneath with little damage.

After Janis’ death in October 1970, the car remained for several years with her manager Albert Grossman in Bearsville, New York. Eventually, it was returned to Janis’ siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin. For a while the Porsche was a star attraction at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, and one year was displayed during the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria.

In 2015, Janis’ kaleidoscopic Porsche sold at auction for $1.76 million – a record-breaking figure for a vehicle like no other.