Janis Joplin saucer, according to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died. Peggy Caserta claimed in her book, "Going Down With Janis" (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines stewardess and owner of one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, said that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users. For approximately the first
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