Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award-Daring to Be Bad Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award, The University of Michigan University Fellowship, The University of Michigan Rackham Dissertation Grant, The University of Michigan Įchols began her career as The Barbra Streisand Professor in Contemporary Gender Studies and Professor of English and History at the University of Southern California on August 15, 2011. She was a visiting associate professor at Rutgers University starting in spring 2007. While in graduate school at the University of Michigan, Echols visited the Rubaiyat, a since-closed predominantly gay bar where the "music just stunk." After persuasion from friends, she got a trial gig and then was hired, beginning her career as a Disco DJ. She obtained her master's degree and Doctorate at the University of Michigan in 19 respectively. Education Įchols received her bachelor's degree from Macalester College, Minnesota in 1973. Here is Joplin the aspiring folksinger, the white-picket-fence wannabe, the wayward daughter, the hit-and-miss recording artist, and, finally, the ill-starred spirit with nothing left to lose.Alice Echols is Professor of History, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Echols, however, elevates this biography above run-of-the-mill rock profiles by painting her subject against an elaborate and ever-changing cultural backdrop. The author does not shy away from sordid sex-and-drugs episodes, and there's plenty of raw material-the singer was promiscuous, bisexual, and, at various times, an alcoholic, a speed freak, and a junkie. She does so by tracing Joplin from her youth as a natural-born libertine in dreary Port Arthur, Texas, to her emergence as the sole female rock superstar of her era-a period when beneath-the-surface sexism hampered Joplin's progress even while women's liberation was being widely touted. To her great credit, author Alice Echols reconciles the two faces of Joplin in this ambitious, thoroughly readable biography. And while Joplin reveled in her own ballsy, boozy legend, its needy, inebriated, real-life equivalent was a shadow that darkened her short life and, in the decades since her 1970 drug-induced death, has come to eclipse the party-girl persona. The brassy, carnal, extravagant, and ultimately pitiable queen of psychedelic rock is indeed a cultural icon. To call Janis Joplin the Judy Garland of the Woodstock set is in some sense a fair characterization.
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