On the day after Janis Joplin died in October 1970, her producer, Paul Rothchild, asked Kris Kristofferson to come by his office. He had a recording he wanted Kris to hear. It was Janis singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” the song Kris had written a few years earlier. He had no idea she had ever put it on tape.
What happened over the next few days stayed with him for the rest of his life.
A recording he never knew about
Janis had known the song longer than she had known Kris. Their mutual friend, the singer Bob Neuwirth, taught it to her in 1969. She was singing it on stage before she and Kris ever met.
They met in the spring of 1970 through Neuwirth and were close for a while. Over time the romance settled into something Kris later compared to a brother and sister. He said the last time they almost spent time together was when Janis was riding the Festival Express, the 1970 concert train tour across Canada.
That fall, Janis was in Los Angeles making her album Pearl with her new Full Tilt Boogie Band. She cut “Me and Bobby McGee” in those sessions and finished it on October 1, 1970. She changed Bobby from a woman to a man and made the song sound like her own story.
Three days later, on October 4, she was found dead in her Hollywood hotel room. She was 27. The album was not finished.
The day after
Kris had once wondered whether Janis’s raw, blues-shouting style would even suit the song. Sitting in Rothchild’s office, he found out how wrong that worry had been. Her voice was full of life, and she was already gone.
He couldn’t stay in the room. He walked out and wandered the streets of Los Angeles in tears.
“I don’t know where I walked.”
He later said that for a long time he could not listen to her version without breaking down. He also said he could almost hear Janis laughing about it, telling everyone to wait until Kris heard what she had done with his song.
A late night in Nashville
When Kris got back to Nashville, he went into the Combine Music building, the publishing company he wrote for, late at night. He did not want to fall apart in front of people every time the song came on. So he played her recording over and over until he could get through it.
His friend Donnie Fritts, a keyboard player and songwriter, came in and sat with him. They started fooling around on the piano. Before the night was over, the two of them had written and recorded a song for Janis.
They called it “Epitaph (Black and Blue).” It is a mournful lament about friends gathering after a death and wondering whether they let her down. Kris put it at the very end of his 1971 album The Silver Tongued Devil and I, and it also became the B-side of his single “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again).”
The hit she never saw
Columbia released Pearl in January 1971, along with “Me and Bobby McGee” as a single. On March 20, 1971, Janis’s version reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for two weeks. It was the only No. 1 single of her career, and only the second posthumous No. 1 of the rock era, after Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Pearl spent nine weeks at No. 1 on the album chart.
For Kris, the timing was cruel. The biggest break of his songwriting career came from the voice of a friend who did not live to hear it on the radio. He said plainly that Janis’s hit “changed everything” for him. A song Roger Miller had first recorded was suddenly on radios everywhere, and the name under the title was Kris Kristofferson.
Every time he sang it
Kris sang “Me and Bobby McGee” at his own shows for the next half century, sometimes opening the show with it. It was the song people came to hear. But it never became just a hit to him.
As late as 2020, talking with the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville, he admitted he still had not gotten over losing her. “I’m not over it yet,” he said, fifty years after that day in Rothchild’s office.
Kris Kristofferson died on September 28, 2024, at his home in Maui. He was 88. Long before that, he had already summed up what the song meant to him.
“Every time I sing it, I still think of Janis.”
Do you remember the first time you heard Janis sing “Me and Bobby McGee” on the radio? Where were you?