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 two October 1968 performances at a roller rink in Alexandria, Virginia, were reviewed by John Segraves of the conservative "Washington Evening Star" at a time when the Washington metropolitan area's hard rock scene was in its infancy. An opera buff at the time, he wrote, "Miss Joplin, in her early 20s, has been for the last year or two the vocalist with Big Brother and the Holding Company, a rock quintet of superior electric expertise. Shortly she will be merely Janis Joplin, a vocalist singing folk rock on her first album as a single. Whatever she does and whatever she