Janis Joplin album features the first and only take that Joplin recorded. A cover of Nick Gravenites's "Buried Alive in the Blues", to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead, was included as an instrumental. Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She
Janis Joplin Joplin was on a "star trip", while others were telling Joplin that Big Brother was a terrible band and that she ought to dump them. "Time" magazine called Joplin "probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement", and Richard Goldstein wrote for the May 1968 issue of "Vogue" magazine that Joplin was "the most staggering leading woman in rock ... she slinks like tar, scowls like war ... clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave ... Janis Joplin can sing the chic off any listener." For her first major studio recording,